



,1 \ :; v^^v 



.e';^^^:S"^t"?' 






'. ("it. 



;i • ■;■;: 



iSeKS!l8^1? 



'.for- : j« ►^ • •*• '"A '. ^'ic ;.. . *V < ^ . 






ffis^% 







'-*'>•- 










GENEEAL McCLELLAI 



▲ KD 



THE CONDUCT OF THE WAR 



BT 



WILLLIAM HENRY HURLBERT. 




/ 



NEW YORK: ^^ 
SHELDON AND COMPANY, 

335 BROADWAY, cor. WORTH ST. 
1864. 



GENERAL McCLELLAN'S 

EEPOET- AND CAMPAIGNS. 

THE ONLY COMPLETE AND ACCURATE EDITION. 

^ — t-4^n 

B7 special arrangement with General McClellan, ^.yl " t\ ,-^ r^. 
SHELDON & CO., *^ l-n?^5^ 
Publishers, 335 Broadway, New York, 
Have published a 

FULL AND COMPLETE EDITION OF HIS REPORT. 

While going through the press, this edition was corrected by General 
McClellan. It has none of the remarkable errors which have crept 
into the Government edition and all the other editions that have fol- 
lowed the Government edition. 

It also has the 

CAMPAiaN IN WESTEE>N VmGINIA, 

prepared by General McClellan expressly for this edition. Illustrated 
with Maps and Plaits op Battles, &»,, prepared by General McClel- 
lan. One volume, 8vo. Price, $3. 

13mo edition of the same, bound in cloth, with all the Maps, price, 
$1 75. Bound in boards, $1 25. 

From the Journal of Commerce. 

"We regret that the Congressional edition, and other cheap editions of the Report, are 
incomplete and inaccurate, omitting entirely some portions which present the most inter- 
esting and important views of the relations of General McClellan to the Cabinet, the army, 
and the country. The edition published by Sheldon & Company, under General McClel- 
lan's authority, is accurate." 

From the, Post, Chicago. 

"Sheldon & Company have issued their edition of General McClellan' s Report on the 
Organization and Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac, to which is added an account 
of the Campaign in West Virginia, from the General's own pen. This edition is the only 
one which gives the main report in full; important parts of it, relating to very critical 
periods in the history of the Army of the Potomac, being omitted from the Congressional 
edition, and, by consequence, from all other editions, without exception, which are mere 
reprints of that. The edition published by Sheldon «& Company is complete and authen- 
tic, and is the only complete and authentic edition." 

From the, Boston Post. 

" No man can feel that he has a copy of McClellan' s Report without a copy of this edi- 
tion." 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by 
SHELDON & COMPANY, 
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Southern District 
of New York. 



8TBREOTYPBD BY PRINTED BY 

BMITH « M0D0X7OAI., O . B . W B B T O T T A 00., 

82 & 84 Beekman St., N. T. 79 John Street, N. Y. 



PEBF AC E. 

I HAVE not attempted in this volume to write either a full 
biography of General McClellan or a complete history of his 
campaigns. 

So far as the biography of a man yet living, and conspicuous 
in the political action of his time, can properly be written at all, 
this work has been admirably done, in respect to General Mc- 
Clellan, by Mr. George S. Hillard, of Boston. And the history 
of General McClellan's campaigns can only be completely writ- 
ten when the archives not of our own war department alone, 
but of the war department of the Confederate States also, 
shall have become accessible to the historian. 

My object has been to depict, as fully and fairly as the docu- 
mentary evidence before me would enable me to do, the parts 
played by General McClellan and by the administration of Mr. 
Lincoln, respectively, in the conduct of the war from its out- 
break, in the spring of 1861, down to the final removal of 
General McClellan from the command of the Army of the Po- 
tomac, in November, 1862. 

About two years ago my attention was specially directed to 
this subject by a remarkable article on the campaign of the 
Army of the Potomac, which appeared in the Revue des Deivx 
Mondes, at Paris, in October, 1862, over the signature of A. 
Trognon, and which was commonly attributed at the time to 
the pen of the Prince de Joinville. It is unnecessary to dwell 
here upon the reasons which make it desirable for a prince of 
the House of Orleans to refrain from signing with his own name 
papers published at Paris, under the imperial regime : but it is 
not, perhaps, improper for me to say that, in a letter on the 
subject of this article, the Prince de Joinville has thus ex- 
pressed himself: "I assure you that I entirely partake the 



IV PREFACE. 

sentiments of respect and admiration entertained towards 
General McClellan by Mr. A. Teognon." 

I published a translation of this article at New York imme- 
diately after its appearance in Paris, and in a brief preface to 
that translation I took occasion to say that the paper must be 
considered to be substantially an indictment of the administra- 
tion of Mr. Lincoln as the really responsible authors of the 
failure of the Peninsular expedition against Richmond. 

All that has since been made known of the history of that 
expedition, as well by the reports of the Joint Congressional 
Committee on the Conduct of the War as by the reports of 
General McClellan himself, and of his subordinate command- 
ers ; by the journals of the time ; and by various official and 
non-official publications on the subject, tends, it seems to me, 
to sustain and to reinforce this indictment. 

Moved to the work by a protracted examination of these 
publications, I had made some progress, more than a year ago, 
in a " Historical Sketch of the Peninsular Campaign," when I 
was led by considerations of no moment to the reader to defer 
the completion of my design. Having been applied to by the 
Messrs. Sheldon & Co., the publishers of General McClellan's 
Report, to furnish them with a narrative of General McClel- 
lan's career as a commander of the national armies, I judged 
it best to elucidate as clearly as I could the peculiar relations 
sustained by General McClellan to the policy of the war as 
well as to its conduct in the field : and I have therefore em- 
bodied in the present volume much of the material prepared 
for use in a more full, careful, and elaborate work than this at 
all pretends to be. 

New York, September 27, 1864. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

Paob. 

Birth and Ancestry op General McClellan. His Training 
AT the Military Academy and in the War with Mexico. 
His Visit to the Crimea. His Resignation from the Army 
and Return to Civil Life • . 9 



CHAPTER II. 

The Origin of the War of 1861. Condition op the Combat- 
ants at the Outset 24 



CHAPTER III. 

Commencement of the War. Condition of Public Senti- 
ment, and op the Military Force in the two Contending 
Sections. The Campaign of Western Virginia. General 
McClellan CALLED TO Washington, . . - . . 86 



CHAPTER IV. 

General McClellan takes Command in Washington. The 
Battle of Bull Run, and the Condition of the Army. 
Change in the Prospects op the War. Reorganization op 
the Forces. General McClellan appointed to the Chief 
Command upon the Resignation op General Scott, . 103 



VI CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER V. 

Paob. 
General McClellan as Commander-in-Chiep. Consequences 
OP THE Victory op Manassas at the South. Preparations 
FOR the General Advance of the Armies op the Union in 
the Spring. Popular Impatience. Mr. Lincoln super- 
sedes General McClellan at the End op Two Months, . 138 



CHAPTER YI. 

General McClellan as Commander-in-Chiep. Holds that 
Position for about Two Months. General Plan op Cam- 
paign AND Politics op the War, 143 



CHAPTER YII. 

Congress and the War. The Joint Committee and the New 
War Secretary, Mr. Stanton. The President assumes 
Command op the Armies, and supersedes General McClel- 
lan. Preliminary History op the Campaign op the Pen- 
insula, . . 160 



CHAPTER YIII. 

The Army op the Potomac in Motion. Retreat op Johnston 
prom Manassas. The Defence op Washington, and op the 
Shenandoah Valley. The Movement to the Peninsula, . 199 



CHAPTER IX. 

The Siege op Torktown. Retreat op the Confederates 
UPON Richmond. Evacuation op Norfolk and Destruction 
OP the Merrimac. The Battle op Williamsburgh, and 
Advance to the Chickahominy, . .... 218 



CONTENTS. Vii 

CHAPTER X. 

Paoe. 

Close op the Peninsula Campaigit. The Army ordeeed to 
AcQUiA Creez, 250 



CHAPTER XI. 

The Removal to Acquia Creek. The Failure op Pope's Cam- 
paign. General McClellan takes Charge op the Army. 
The Campaign op Maryland, 277 



CHAPTER XII. 

After Antietam. General McClellan crosses the Poto- 
mac. The Emancipation Proclamation issued by the 
President. General McClellan relieved from jthe 
Command of the Army, . . 295 



CHAPTER XIII. 

Nomination op General McClellan to the Presidency. 
The Conduct op the War. Mr. Lincoln and his Aulic 
Council. General McClellan's Policy op the War. His 
True Record as a Commander, 304 



CHAPTER I. 

BlKTH AND ANCESTRY OF GENERAL MeCLELLAN. HIS TRAINING AT THE 
MILITARY ACADEMY AND IN THE WAR WITH MEXICO. HIS VISIT TO 
THE CRIMEA. HIS RESIGNATION FROM THE ARMY AND RETXXRN TO 
CIVIL LIFE. 

Majok-General George Brinton McClellan was born 
in the city of Philadelphia, the seat of the Colonial Congress, 
the original capital of the American Union, the consecrated 
birthplace of our national greatness, on the 3d day of De- 
cember, 1826. 

His father, a physician of eminence, was a native of Con- 
necticut, into which " land of steady habits" and of sterling 
men his ancestors had migrated from the mountains of Scot- 
land, bringing with them the ancient Scottish love of liberty 
and of law, the just, tenacious nature of that hardy and heroic 
race which has bulwarked freedom and beaten back oppres- 
sion on so many a hard-fought field from the days of Bruce 
and Wallace to our own. 

The American people are not much given to inquiring into 
the ancestry of those who do the State service ; but the faith 
which the republicans of old Rome held in the virtue of blood 
while still the Republic stood, was abundantly vindicated 
when the Roman people saw the shameless despotism of the 
worst of the Caesars administered by men of base extraction 
and of corrupt birth. And wherever the permanence and the 
power of the commonwealth depend upon the virtue of its 
public servants, it should be no insignificant recommendation 
of a man to the confidence of his fellow-citizens that his 



10 LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 

fathers in their time were citizens of credit — "men, high- 
minded men," who knew alike their duties and their rights, 
and were as firm in maintaining the latter as they were faith- 
ful in fulfilling the former. 

Such were those New England volunteers of the Revolution 
of whom the historian Bancroft tells us that, within a fortnight 
after the stand made at Lexington, there was scarcely a town 
in Connecticut that was not represented among the besiegers 
at Boston. The men who thus swarmed to the defence of 
their country were no reckless and revolutionary horde, delight- 
ing in war and careless of life. To use the words of the same 
historian, they were " men of substantial worth, of whom 
almost every one represented a household. The members of 
the several companies were well known to each other, as to 
brothers, kindred, and townsmen ; known to the old men who 
remained at home, and to aU the matrons and maidens. They 
were sure to be remembered weekly in the exercises of 
the congregations ; and morning and evening in the usual 
family devotions they were commended with fervent piety to 
the protection of Heaven. Every young soldier lived and 
acted, as it were, under the keen observation of all those 
among whom he had grown up, and was sure that his conduct 
would occupy the tongues of his village companions while he 
was in the field, and perhaps be remembered his life long. 
The camp of liberty was a gathering in arms of schoolmates, 
neighbors, and friends ; and Boston was beleaguered round 
from Roxbury to Chelsea by an unorganized, fluctuating mass 
of men, each with his own musket and his little store of car- 
tridges, and such provisions as he brought with him, or as 
were sent after him, or were contributed by the people round 
about." 

Of such a stock came George Brinton McClellan. 

Removing from Connecticut to Pennsylvania, his father had 
achieved by his abilities and character a high position in the 
midst of that galaxy of accomplished medical men by whom 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 11 

the name of Philadelpfiia as the metropolis of physical science 
and the healing art in the New World was made illustrious 
throughout both hemispheres. It was the best reward of the 
life-long exertions of Dr. McClellan that he was thereby ena- 
bled to bestow upon his children all the advantages of educa- 
tion which the country could afford ; and at the early age of 
thirteen George was entered as a student of the Freshman 
class in the University of Pennsylvania. 

An inborn vocation, however, led him, as a like impulse a 
century before had led a certain young surveyor in Virginia, 
towards the life of an engineer and a soldier ; and a cadet's 
warrant having been obtained for him, George Briuton 
McClellan in 1842 was sent to the Military Academy at 
West Point. 

It is perhaps scarcely worth while to defend the Academy 
at West Point against the charges with wljiich ignorance and 
passion have so often, in the course of the present war, as- 
sailed it. But the testimony of Gen. Barnard is so explicit in 
contradiction of the assertion that the influences exerted at 
the Academy upon the minds of the students have ever been 
unfavorable to the development of a large, loyal and intelligent 
patriotism, that it may well be quoted here. *' That the great- 
er part of the educated officers of the United States Array," 
says Gen. Barnard, in his treatise on the battle of Bull Run, 
" should have proved false to their flag, and gone over to the 
cause of secession, would imply that that cause had in it that 
which could justify a body of loyal and highly educated men, 
sworn defenders of the flag of their country, to espouse a 
cause which made flagrant war upon it. The facts are these: 
Of nine hundred and fifty-one officers of the Army, two hun- 
dred and sixty-two have proved disloyal. They (the disloyal) 
were, with a few exceptions, born in the seceding States ; and 
it was not until their States had seceded, and placed them- 
selves in hostile array, that such yielded (and most of them 
sorrowfully) to the supposed necessity of casting their lot with 



12 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

the section which gave them hirth. Several of those who felt, 
themselves called uponj^o relinquish their commissions in the 
army have declined to enter the Confederate service, and 
array themselves against their flag. Many more are known 
to have resigned with similar resolution, but returning to their 
native States, they have found themselves compelled to serve 
— compelled by influences which none but a martyr resists. 
The number of commissioned officers of the regular army 
borne on the Register for January, 1862, was two thousand 
and nine. Three hundred and three were born in the slave 
States, (District of Columbia included,) of whom one hundred 
and thirty were graduates of the Military Academy. Eighty- 
nine were born in seceded States, of whom forty-five were 
graduates of the Military Academy. More than half of these 
latter graduates were from Virginia, but all the seceded States, 
except Mississippi, were represented. The number of officers 
of the army born in the free States who went over to the 
rebel cause is small, and can be counted on the fingers." 

At the Military Academy the young McClellan soon found 
himself thoroughly at home, distinguished himself in the 
exact studies to which he was called upon to apply his 
mind, and won the esteem of his superiors by his scholarlike 
and soldierly bearing. He was graduated with the second 
honors of his class in 1846 ; assigned to duty with a company 
of the Engineers, and ordered before the close of the year 
into active service on the line of the Rio Grande River. 

The war with Mexico was then raging ; and Lieutenant 
McClellan reached his post just after the battle of Monterey 
had been fought and won. It is a curious coincidence, and 
perhaps not altogether unworthy of notice, that although 
many years younger than Mr. Lincoln, General McClellan 
should have made his first appearance in the public service of 
the country simultaneously with the national debut of his 
actual competitor for the presidential chair. 

Abraham Lincoln appeared for the first time on the stage 



htFB OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 13 

of national affairs in 1847, as a member of Congress from the 
State of Illinois ; and although by no means prominent in the 
debates of the House of llepresentatives, he yet attracted atten- 
tion by the pertinacity with which he denounced the national 
administration as having provoked the war with Mexico un- 
necessarily and wantonly, if not wickedly and with a sinister 
purpose. If we are to accept the cant of the present day, in 
deed the actual president of 1864 was in 1847 a most malig- 
nant and active Mexican *' Copperhead." 

In 1847 George Brinton McClellan also appeared for the 
first time on the stage of national affairs, as a soldier in the 
field upholding the honor of the national flag. After a brief 
period of service, at once obscure and arduous, on the banks 
of the Rio Grande, the young Lieutenant was ordered to 
Tampico in January, 1847, to take part in the concentration 
of troops then going on in preparation for the grand expedi- 
tion which General Scott was about to lead in the footsteps of 
Cortez against the capital of Montezuma. 

The future Commander of the Army of the Potomac was 
thus made an eye-witness at the outset of his career of the 
political diflSculties and the personal spites which so often sur- 
round the path and thwart the plans of the truest patriots and 
the most accomplished military leaders. No one who is fa- 
miliar with the history of his country needs to be reminded 
of the jealousies with which General Scott was forced to con- 
tend before he could set himself free to move against the pub- 
lic enemy ; and the scenes which passed before the eyes of the 
young Lieutenant of Engineers during that fretful winter at 
Tampico must have often recurred to the mind of the Com- 
mander of the Army of the Potomac during that period of 
tremendous but unappreciated labor which intervened between 
the rout of General McDowell in July, 1861, and the marvel- 
lous proclamation made six months afterwards, urM et orbl, to 
the city and to the world by Abraham Lincoln, of his delibe- 
rate intention to " crush " the great rebellion by a simultane- 



14 LIFE OF GEIT. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

ous advance of all the armies of the Union on the 2 2d of Feb- 
ruary, 1862. 

In the beginning of the month of March, 1847, the army 
of General Scott at last disembarked from its transports to 
the west of the island of Sacrificios, and the memorable siege 
of Vera Cruz and San Juan d'Ulloa began. 

It is not our purpose minutely to pursue the fortunes of 
Lieutenant McClellan through the wonderful campaign of 
which this siege was the initial chapter. 

Who, indeed, can now find the heart to rewrite or even to 
reperuse the annals of that campaign, in which, if fanaticism 
and folly are to wreak their will upon us unchecked, American 
soldiers of the North and of the South, of the East and of 
the West, for the last time marched side by side to death and 
victory ? 

The executive documents of the Thirtieth Congress, in 
which the story of that glorious campaign lies embalmed, and 
awaits the historian's skillful hand, can be read now without 
overmastering emotion only by the fanatic or the fool, by him 
who is indifferent to his country's fate, or by him who re- 
joices in her ruin. 

To these formal and official pages the course of subsequent 
events has given the painful interest of a tragedy. In them 
we read how, working with an equal zeal to serve one common 
cause. Lieutenants Beauregard and McClellan earned the com- 
mendation of their commander in the trenches before Vera 
Cruz ; in them we read how the escort of Captain Robert E. 
Lee, engaging the skirmishers of Valencia in the Pedregal, 
opened that stern, unswerving march which led the stars and 
stripes, through storm and stress of strife and victory, up to 
their station of triumph on the heights of Chapultepec and the 
towers of the city of Montezuma. Heintzelman and Magru- 
der, Kearney and Pillow, meet us, marching, manceuvering, 
fighting manfully together under the one old flag. One day Lieu- 
tenant T. J. Jackson, " the horses of his guns nearly all killed 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE E. McCLELLAN. 15 

or disabled, his drivers and cannoniers cut up," gets one ot his 
pieces from under the direct fire of Chapultepec, opens upon 
the enemy, and holds the battle till the castle is carried. An- 
other day. Lieutenant Reno, " in the advance with his moun- 
tain howitzers," maintains against the superior artillery of the 
enemy so fierce a fire as saves the bold advance of " Lieuten- 
ant-Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston" with his voltigeurs. Now 
we have " Captain Hooker " riding gallantly down alone to 
reconnoitre the ground for Lieutenant-Colonel Hebert, of Lou- 
isiana ; anon, " Lieutenant Grant, of the Fourth Infantry," 
pushed forward with a party to aid in securing advantages 
won by the troops of Tennessee and South Carolina. 

Between these once fraternal names how wide a gulf has 
since been dug by passion, by madness, and by folly — a gulf 
which, in the providence of God, nothing surely but reason 
and justice can ever bridge again ! 

The peculiar importance of that arm of the service to which, 
in virtue of his distinction won at the Academy, Lieutenant 
McClellan was attached, naturally gave him a prominence in 
the operations of General Scott's advance to which his years 
and his rank would not otherwise have entitled him. He won 
his promotion to the rank of second lieutenant early in the 
campaign, and received his brevet as first lieutenant for gallant 
and meritorious conduct at the battle of Contreras on the 1 9th 
of August of the same year. The service of the engineers and 
the staff officers at Contreras was of the most arduous kind, 
testing in the highest degree the coolness, the personal brav- 
ery, and the powers of physical endurance, as well as the pro- 
fessional skill, of those engaged in it. General Valencia's po- 
sition was infinitely more formidable from the broken, rough, 
and impracticable character of the country, than from the skill 
with which that pompous and wordy personage had selected 
and intrenched his camp, and the reconnoissance which deter- 
mined the route taken by our troops to assault and overwhelm 
their enemy, had to be executed on a moonless night, over 



16 LIFE OF GEN. GEOBGE B. McCLELLAN. 

rocky and precipitous mule-paths, through a region of wild ra- 
vines and tangled forests. 

Deserted in disgust by Santa Anna, whose advice he had 
scorned, and whom he hoped by a decisive victory over the 
American invaders to oust from power, Valencia was utterly 
bewildered by the attack to which this dangerous night recon- 
noissance opened the way ; his troops, finding themselves in- 
extricably involved, were stricken with a panic, and one of the 
most complete victories of the war rewarded the skill of our 
commanders and the valor of our troops. 

When compared with the scale on which war has since been 
waged by American armies, the battles through which our 
soldiers fought their way to the city of Mexico may seem, in- 
deed, but petty and insignificant combats. But the campaign 
of 1847 was, in truth, a most instructive school for the officers 
who passed through it. Not less by the mistakes and failures 
of the enemy than by our own successes were the capable and 
the thoughtful among those officers taught rightly to estimate 
the tremendous difficulties which attend a war of invasion, and 
the formidable advantages enjoyed by an army acting on the 
defensive in a country sparsely populated, broken, rugged, and 
densely wooded ; nor is it easy to imagine the extent of the 
disasters which must have befallen the cause of the Union, in 
the outset of the existing war, had we possessed no officers 
qualified by such an experience to neutralize, in part at least, 
the follies and the presumption of the arrogant and ignorant 
civilians whose influence has been since so lamentably felt in 
the disturbance of well considered plans of campaign, and the 
waste of well organized resources. 

The hard-fought action of Molino del Reyon the 8th of Sep 
tember, 1847, afforded Lieutenant McClellan an occasion to 
prove that his rapid promotion in his profession had not dis- 
turbed that conscientious love of justice which is one of the 
rooted qualities of his nature. 

The conduct of the attack upon the Mexican positions at 



LIFE OF QEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 1** 

Molino del Rey had been confided by General Scott to General 
Worth. The ostensible object of this attack was the destruc- 
tion of a cannon foundry which the Mexicans were believed to 
have established at that point ; but as General Worth found 
reason to anticipate such a resistance as might lead to a gen- 
eral action for the possession of the heights and fortress of 
Chapultepec, it was of the first importance for him to be thor- 
oughly informed of the true nature of the defenses thrown up 
by Santa Anna at Molino del Rey, and of the true proportions 
of the force which the Mexican President would there array 
against him. Two serious reconnoissances were accordingly 
ordered by General Worth before the attack was made, and 
in these reconnoissances Lieutenant McClellan bore a distin- 
guished part. 

The conflict which followed assumed the character of a bat- 
tle — the most fiercely contested battle, indeed, of the whole 
war — in which, after hours of desperate onslaught, an aggre- 
gate American force about three thousand five hundred strong 
assailed and drove from their formidable intrenchments a Mex- 
ican army numbering at least ten thousand men, with the loss 
to the enemy of four pieces of artillery and nearly a thousand 
prisoners. Lieutenant McClellan was offered the brevet rank 
of captain for his share in this victory, but declined to receive 
it on the ground that he was not fully entitled to it, having 
been concerned in the preliminary operations alone, and not 
in the actual assault and capture of the enemy's works. The 
maxim palmam qui meruit ferat is not often thus rigorously 
applied to his own case by a young and ambitious man active- 
ly engaged in the most exciting of professions. Within a 
week, however, the storming of Chapultepec, and the conse- 
quent occupation of the Mexican capital, gave the magnani- 
mous young soldier a fresh opportunity of winning, by actual 
service and exposure in the stricken field, the rank which he 
disdained otherwise to wear. He was breveted a captain for 



18 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

these crowning operations of the campaign on the 14th Sep- 
tember, 1847. 

As Captain McClellan, he remained with the army in Mexi- 
co till the signing of the treaty of peace with that republic. 
The administration of a conquered city necessarily afforded to 
a soldier of his character and training many valuable op- 
portunities of observation and reflection upon the true rela- 
tions of the military with the civil authority. The impotence 
of mere force to maintain or restore a solid tranquillity in the 
social order is never so apparent to a clear and vigorous mind 
as when force is clothed with a temporary omnipotence ; the 
beauty and the majesty of law are never so apparent as when 
the calm and constant operation of the law is for a time sus- 
pended in favor of the sword. As the Duke of "Wellington 
learned during his long military mastery of the peninsula and 
his briefer practical dictatorship of Paris that profound dislike 
of all unnecessary military interference with civil affairs which, 
at a later day, when England was convulsed with civil com- 
motion, made the veteran of a hundred victories the calmest, 
most forbearing, and most conciliatory of English statesmen, 
so we may be sure that his experience of conquest and of mili- 
tary rule in Mexico contributed mainly to fix in the mind of 
Captain McClellan those sound and moderate principles of 
policy which were afterward to develop themselves so wisely 
and so firmly in the proclamations and in the conduct of the vic- 
tor of West Virginia and the leader of the Peninsula campaign. 
In June, 1848, Captain McClellan returned to the United 
States, and was almost immediately ordered to the post at 
West Point, where, for three years, he remained in command 
of the company of sappers and miners. In June, 1851, he 
was removed to Fort Delaware to superintend the construc- 
tion of the works, and early in the next year he fulfilled the 
common destiny of the ofiicers of the regular army of the 
Union by joining an expedition for the exploration of the far 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. MoCLELLAN. 19 

western territory of the Red River, under the command of 
Colonel Marcy, whose daughter has since become his wife. 

From the Red River he passed into Texas upon the staff of 
General Persifer F. Smith, and until March, 1853, was occu- 
pied in the survey of the Texan coast. From the sea-breezes 
of the Gulf and the lowlands of Texas he was suddenly trans- 
ferred to the neighborhood of the Rocky Mountains, going to 
Washington Territory in the spring of 1853, and remaining 
there until May, 1854, in charge of the western division of 
the survey for the northern route to the Pacific Ocean. The 
vast extent, the magnificent possibiUties, the grand unity in 
variety of our great national dominion, which are but sound- 
ing forms of words on the lips of so many a blatant orator, 
become simple realities to the intelligent American officer 
whose routine of duty thus leads him from one extremity to 
another of the imperial republic ; and the sentiemnt of conti- 
nental patriotism, which is so vague and passionate in the 
^inds of most men, is thus made to him a substantial and 
controlling impulse of his nature. 

But Captain McClellan's love and reverence of American 
nationality were to be intensified by a wider and still more 
impressive experience. In March, 1855, he was promoted to 
a full captaincy in the First Cavalry, and, with Major Delafield 
and Major Mordecai, was ordered to proceed to Europe, there 
to study the operations of the great war then raging between 
the western allies and the Russian empire. "War on a scale 
which had become traditional in our time, war waged upon 
the principles of the Napoleonic era, but with all the applian- 
ces of modern progress, was now to pass under his inspection. 
When Captain McClellan and his companions reached the 
Crimea, in the early part of the summer of 1855, the most 
trying period of the great allied invasion had already been 
overpassed. The battle of the Alma had been fought and 
won ; Sebastopol had been invested, so far as investment was 
practicable ; victory had been snatched by the troops of 



20 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLEILLAK. 

France and England from the very jaws of ruin, on the 
heights of Inkermann. But the spectacle which met the eyes 
of the American commissioners was far more instructive than 
any shock of battle could have been. In the course of his in- 
vestigations into the organization and establishment of the 
allied forces before the Russian stronghold, Captain McCleUan 
learned to estimate aright the tremendous hazards which, even 
m modern times, and with all the advantages given by a com- 
plete command alike of the sea and of all the "sinews of 
war," attend what may be properly called, as Mr. Kinglake 
has called it, a colossal " adventure of invasion." 

As a means of training the future Commander of the Army 
of the Potomac, nothing more apt and admirable than this 
visit to the Crimea could well have been imagined. 

England and France, the two greatest military and naval 
powers of modern times, after many years of uninterrupted in- 
tercourse with all parts of Europe, found themselves brought 
to the necessity of invading a remote and almost isolated prov^^ 
ince of the Russian Empire. 

" Their fleets had dominion over aU the Euxine Sea, home to 
the straits of the Kertch. They had the command of the 
Bosphorus, the Dardanelles, the Mediterranean, and of the 
whole ocean ; and of all the lesser seas, bays, gulfs, and 
straits from the Gulf of Gibraltar to wathin sight of St. Peters- 
burgh. The Czar's Black Sea fleet existed, but existed in 
close durance, shut up under the guns of Sebastopol." The 
expeditionary force of the Western allies numbered sixty- 
three thousand men, and a hundred and twenty-eight guns. 
The objective point of their campaign was a single city, 
held to be impregnable by sea, but by land wholly open to at- 
tack, and garrisoned, when the allies moved against it, by 
about forty-five thousand men. Yet such was the difficulty of 
obtaining accurate knowledge in regard to the condition and 
strength of this single city, though the embassadors of France 
and England and Constantinople, their generals and admirals, 



LITE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 21 

and the Foreign Offices of both countries, had been engaged 
for months with unlimited means in procuring it, that the 
French marshal, St. Arnaud, believed the enemy's force to be 
seventy thousand men, while the English Admiral Dundas 
supposed it to amount to one hundred and twenty thousand. 
Of the commander of the English army, Mr. Kinglake says : 
" It was natural, that a general who was within a few hours' 
sail of the country which he was to invade, and was yet 
unable to obtain from it any, even slight, glimmer of know- 
ledge, should distrust information which had travelled round 
to him (through the aid of the Home government) along the 
circumference of a vast circle ; and Lord Raglan certainly 
considered that, in regard to the strength of the enemy in 
the Crimea and the land defenses of Sebastopol, he was simply 
without knowledge." 

From these inevitable incidents of a great errand of inva- 
sion, even in Europe, it had resulted that the commanders of 
the allied armies, after effecting an unopposed landing on the 
shore of the Crimea, and winning a brilliant victory within a 
day's march of Sebastopol, had found themselves compelled, 
by every consideration of military prudence, to such delays in 
their movement upon that place as afforded its Russian de- 
fenders time enough to avail themselves of the genius of a 
young engineer who, with pickax and spade, rapidly made their 
stronghold as formidable by land as it had before been by sea, 
and determined, by his achievements in a single siege, the 
whole modern system of fortifications. 

All that it was the rare privilege of Captain McClellan to 
see and learn of the relations between politics and the military 
art, and of the practical operations of war conducted upon 
the grandest scale, during his visit to Sebastopol, might, how- 
ever, let us here observe, have produced but an imperfect and 
inadequate effect upon his mind, had not his own previous and 
priceless, though comparatively limited, experience in Mexi- 
co prepared him intelligently to receive it, and fitted him to 



22 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

deduce from it the most solid instruction and the most dura- 
ble convictions. The immediate fruit of his sojourn in Eu- 
rope at this time was an elaborate and exhaustive report upon 
the constitution of the greater European armies, which was 
published under the authority of Congress in the early part 
of the year 1857, and which bears irrefragable witness to the 
pains and zeal with which the young officer had devoted him- 
self to mastering the minutest details, as well as the broadest 
principles, of military organization. But of infinitely greater 
pith and moment to himself and to his country were the 
larger and deeper results of this military tour upon his mental 
constitution and his habits of thought. 

The officers of the regular army of the United States, al- 
though most carefully trained in the principles of mathemati- 
cal science and of the military art, during the four years of 
their academic course, have enjoyed for the most part in 
later life but few and limited opportunities of military experi- 
ence. With the exception of the Mexican war, the lives of 
most of them now living had been passed, when the great re- 
bellion broke upon us, in a routine of post and garrison duty 
between the peaceful sea-board of the Atlantic and the fron- 
tier forts of the Far West. A harassing but contemptible 
warfare with the roving Indian tribes of the trans-Mississippi 
educated them to practical skill in the handling of small de- 
tachments, but could do nothing, of course, toward familiari- 
zing them with the spirit and the necessities of war on a 
grand scale. Many of them, inspired with a genuine zeal and 
love for their profession, were at great pains to master all that 
books could teach upon this subject. But as the most scien- 
tific and thoughtful of military authorities. Baron Jomini, has 
well observed, " war, practical war is not an afiTair of mathe- 
matical demonstrations ; it is a passioiiate drama^'' and no 
study of military literature, however judicious and faithful, 
can teach in years so much available military truth as a soldier 
like McClellan must imbibe from a few weeks of actual living 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 23 

contact with the realities of war as he came upon and mingled 
with them in the Crimea. After the publication of this Re- 
port on the condition of the armies of Europe, in January, 
1857, Captain McClellan resigned his commission in the 
army and went into civil life. 

He was appointed chief-engineer of the Illinois Central 
Railroad, and upon the completion of that great enterprise 
was elected vice-president of the company, which post he con- 
tinued to fill, residing at Chicago, until the month of August, 
1860, when, having been chosen president of the Eastern Di- 
vision of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad, he removed to 
Cincinnati. Governor Dennison, of Ohio, in response to the 
first call of the President of the United States for volunteers 
to aid in the suppression of the rebellion and in maintaining 
the supremacy of the constitution, appointed George Brinton 
McClellan Major-General, to command the contingent of the 
State, being thirteen regiments of infantry. This commission 
was ofiered and accepted on the 23d of April, 1861. 

On the 10th of May, 1861, the general government assigned 
General McClellan to the command of the Department of 
Ohio, embracing the States of Ohio, Indiana and IlHnois, with 
his headquarters at Cincinnati. Four days afterward he was 
commissioned a Major-General in the regular army, which 
rank he now holds. From this appointment dates his entrance 
into active service in the present war. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE ORIGIN OP THE WAB OF 1861. COITOITION OF THE COMBATANTS 
AT THE OUTSET. 

The civil war which began with the surrender of Fort 
Sumter to the Confederate General Beauregard, in April, 1861, 
found the States of the South and of the North almost equally- 
unprepared, in the condition of their treasuries and their 
armaments, for such a contest as the events of a very few 
months sufficed to develop into its true proportions. 

Threats of disunion as a remedy for political evils not other- 
wise to be reached, had indeed been frequent in the history of 
the American Kepublic ; but they had never led either the 
people of the States or the Federal Government seriously to 
consider and guard against the formidable consequences con- 
tingent upon a deliberate attempt to put those threats into 
effect. This is the more remarkable, that the history of the 
Union is the history, not of the gradual disintegration of that 
which had been at first a unit of feelings and of interests, but 
rather of the attempted consoHdation of communities occupy- 
ing an area of territory half as large as Europe ; and divided, 
not only by distance and the difficulties of communication over 
so vast a region, but by their traditions, their habits, and the 
general economy of their life. 

When the British Colonies combined, from the frontiers of 
Canada to the frontiers of Florida, in a common resistance to 
Parliamentary usurpation, the adherents of the Crown were 
not less confounded by the harmony in action of Virginia with 
New England, and of Pennsylvania with the Carolinas, than 



LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 25 

by the general spirit and energy with which the rebellious 
colonists confronted the metropolitan power of England, then 
advanced, by the triumphant administration of Chatham, to 
heights of imperial splendor unattained before in all her 
history.* 

Under the stress of the Revolutionary War, the tendency 
to Union was naturally strengthened in the hearts of the peo- 

* *' Nothing has surprised people more than the Virginians and Mary- 
landers joining with so much warmth with the New England Republi- 
cans, in their opposition to their ancient Constitution. ... As there 
are certainly no nations under heaven more opposite than these Colo- 
nies, it would he very difficult to account for it on the principle of 
religion and sound policy, had not the Virginians discovered their in- 
difference to both." — Mivington's Gazette — (Quoted by Fowler, Sect. 
Cont., p. 8.) 

See, also, Irving's Life of Washington, vol. ii., p. 387. (lb.) Franklin 
(Works, vol. iv., p. 37) uses the existence of independent communities 
united under the British flag, as an argument against the claims of 
Parliament. " In fact," he writes, " the British empire is not a single 
State, it comprehends many. . . . We have the same king, but not the 
same legislature." 

As to the great differences of feeling that existed between the Colo- 
nies even in the high noon of the Revolutionary temper, a cloud of 
witnesses might be summoned up. 

John Adams, in describing his journey to Congress, in 1774, records 
the fact that many of the New York patriots were " intimidated lest 
the leveling spirit of the New England Colonies should propagate 
itself in New York." "Phil Livingston," he says, "is a great rough 
mortal, who threw out hints about Goths and Vandals, hanging 
Quakers," and the like, for the benefit of the Eastern patriots. In 
Philadelphia, too, he found Massachusetts distrusted and scolded. 

Patrick Henry's famous speech, in which he declared that he was 
" not a Virginian but an American," John Adams shows us, met with a 
tart and unsympathetic reply. " A little colony has its all at stake as 
well as a great one," exclaimed Major Sullivan. 

Nor can there be any doubt that feelings of jealousy and distrust be- 
tween the Colonies had much to do with the reluctance displayed by 
the Congress of the Colonies to take the decisive step of abolishing the 
royal supremacy. The only point distinctly settled by the inconsistent 
accounts which Adams and Jefferson have left of the genesis of the 
Declaration of Independence, is the fact that Massachusetts was com- 
pelled to surrender the leadership in the matter to Virginia, in order 
to conciliate the support of the Southern and Middle Colonies. 



26 LIFE OF GEN". GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

pie of the various Colonies, although abundant evidence exists 
to justify the emphatic assertion of the elder Adams, that *' it 
required more serenity of temper, a deeper understanding, and 
more courage than fell to the lot of Marlborough, to ride in 
the whirlwind" of sectional passions and interests which con- 
vulsed not Congress and the country alone, but the army 
itself With peace and independence these passions naturally 
became more clamorous, and these interests more antagonistic 
than ever. The inhabitants of thirteen British Colonies had 
acquired a fresh importance in their own eyes by becoming 
citizens of as many American States. It was the earnest hope 
of the wise and great men who presided over the foundation 
of the new Confederacy, that the general government might 
be so administ(%'ed as gradually to wear away the centrifugal 
forces of local pride and prejudice and interest ; and the ear- 
liest history of the Union is the history of their persistent 
and patriotic efforts to achieve this paramount object of states- 
manship in America.* 

The disruption in 1787 of that which in. its articles of or- 
ganization had been described as the "perpetual" Confedera- 
tion, though in form a revolutionary act, was in substance an 
attempt to construct " a more perfect Union by dissolving 
that which could no longer bind, and leaving the separate 
parts to be united by the law of political gravitation to the 
centre."! 

The Constitutional Convention of 1787, after discussing the 

* In the Congress of the Confederation, it was announced as a mat- 
ter of course by Mr, Graham, of Massachusetts, that the Eastern States, 
at the invitation of the Legislature of Massachusetts, were about to 
form a convention with New York, for " regulating matters of common 
concern." A debate arose hereupon, (April 1, 1783,) in which Hamilton 
and Madison earnestly insisted upon the peril to the Union of such 
conventions, which Mr. Bland, of Virginia, described as " young Con- 
gresses." 

•)• John Quincy Adams. (Jubilee Oration, delivered in New York, on 
the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution.) 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 27 

bases of this " more perfect Union," from May to November, 
finally adopted, as the sole alternative of a disorderly dissolu- 
tion, a plan of Constitution which was very far from com- 
manding the cordial and deliberate support of the delegates, 
and was with no little difficulty recommended to the favor of 
their constituents.* Four of the States, indeed, New York, 
Virginia, Rhode Island, and North CaroUna, declined to join 
in this action ; and though the first two of these States soon 
entered the new Confederacy, Rhode Island and North Caro- 
lina insisted upon trying the experiment of independence, and 
refused to accept the new terms of Union with their former 
confederates, the one for a little less and the other for a little 
more than three years. No men were more concerned as to 
the feasibility of maintaining and consolidating the Union thus 
framed and formed of such materials, than those who had 
taken an active and patriotic part in constructing it. 

The fears that John Adams had expressed in I775,f as to 
the consequences which might and probably would flow from 
the rooted " dissimilitude of character" between the people 
of the different Colonies, were felt as keenly in 1V89 by men 
of the most widely different views on all other subjects. It 
was with a heavy heart that "Washington left his home in 
Virginia to assume the presidential chair, and the scenes of 
popular joy and exultation through which he passed, on his 
way to the temporary capital of the newly founded nation, 
moved him to forebodings scarcely less melancholy than those 
with which the most gifted member of the cabinet of Wash- 

* Secret Debates of the Constitutional Convention. By Luther 
Martin of Maryland, and Lansing of New York. 

f " I dread the consequences of this dissimilitude of character, and 
without the utmost caution on both sides, and the most considerate 
forbearance with one another, and prudent condescensions on both 
sides, they will certainly be fatal." — Adams' Works, ix., 367. 

John Adams hoped to see the danger conquered by an " alteration of 
the Southern Constitutions," but it was decreed that the cotton-gin, 
California, and Richard Cobden, should disappoint this hope. 



28 LIFE OF GEN. OEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

ington has left it upon record, that he himself undertook " to 
prop the frail and worthless fabric."* 

Under the administrtion of Washington, the conflict of 
sectional interests, as well as of sectional character, between 
the Northern and Southern States of the Union developed itself 
in discussions, which, although they were conducted for the 
most part, with candor and decorum, and in a temper of recip- 
rocal respect, very clearly foreshadowed the dangers of the 
future. The institution of slavery at that time existed in most 
of the States of the Union, as well as throughout the British 
Colonial Empire. It was denounced by conspicuous statesmen 
at the South as well as at the North. The ordinance of '87, 
excluding slavery from the ISTorth-western Territory, was origi- 
nated and passed by the South in the Congress of the Confeder- 
ation ; and the further introduction of slaves into Virginia had 
been prohibited by' law in that commonwealth two years be- 
fore the adoption in Massachusetts of that justly famous "Bill 
of Rights," by which slavery was afterwards judicially held to 
have been abolished in that State.f In the important agricul- 
tural States of the South, however, the number of slaves was 
greater, and their labor more productive than in the Middle 
and Northern States ; and although the slavery question can- 
not properly be said to have been dangerously debated between 
the representatives of the South and of the North before the 
epoch of the "Missouri Compromise" in 1820, it undoubtedly 
contributed to the vivacity with which the differing commer- 
cial interests of the two sections were discussed in the Congress 
of the Union from the outset of its history. 

But it was upon a great question of finance, the proposition 

* " Perliaps no man in tlie United States lias sacrificed or done more 
for the present Constitution tlian myself, and contrary to all my antici- 
pations of its fate, as you well know, from the very beginning, I am 
still laboring to prop the frail and worthless fabric." — Hamilton's 
Warks, vi., 530. 

f Dunbar. Rise and Decline of Commercial Slavery in America. 
New York, 1863, pp. 213-16. 



LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 29 

made by Mr. Hamilton, then secretary of the treasury, that the 
Federal government should assume the debts of the States, that 
the two great sections of the Union were, in 1790, for the first 
time arrayed against each other in an attitude sufficiently om- 
inous of coming mischief to justify the earnestness with which 
Washington, in his farewell address, a few years afterwards, 
warned his countrymen against the organization of sectional 
parties. The Northern States supported, the Southern States 
opposed this measure with so much acrimony on either side, that 
when the proposition was finally rejected. Congress met and 
adjourned from day to day without doing anything ; and the 
members from the Eastern States openly threatened the seces- 
sion of those States from the Union, and the formation of an 
Eastern Confederacy. * A compromise was finally efiected by 
the concession to the South of a site for the National Capital 
on the banks of the Potomac, in return for the reconsideration 
by the Southern members of the vote which had defeated the 
" Assumption Bill ;" and American statesmanship received its 
first important lesson in the only policy which could be reason- 
ably rehed upon to confirm and consummate the union of the 
States. This lesson Mr. Jefierson, writing in 1792 to General 
Washington, declared had been lost upon the people of the 
Northern States, whose representatives in Congress had 
" availed themselves of no occasion of allaying the Southern 
opposition to the original coalescence"! of the States; and 
the objections of Washington to accepting a second presiden- 
tial term were finally removed by the solemn consideration 
that the " continuance of the Union " depended upon the con- 
fidence which lihe people of both sections reposed in him, and 
in him alone. 

The importance of this consideration became painfully ob- 
vious during the administration of the successor of Washing- 

* Jefferson's Abridgment of Debates, vol. i., p. 350. 
f Jefferson's Works, vol. i., p. 359. 



30 LIFE OP GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 

ton. The resolutions passed in 1798 by the States of Virginia 
and Kentucky, in opposition to the high-handed policy of Mr. 
Adams, were couched in terms which clearly revealed the 
determination of those States to break asunder, in a certain 
contingency, the bond which united them with their Confed- 
erates.* 

The policy of Mr. Adams, and the party by which 'that 
policy had been supported, were alike overwhelmed in the 
fresh political reaction of 1801, which carried Mr. Jefferson 
into power, and which that statesman styled the " peaceful 
revolution."! The conditions of American society, and the 
direction of American history, were profoundly affected by 
this revolution, and its most conspicuous immediate results 
were greatly to intensify the centrifugal forces of sectional 
feeling in the country, and greatly to widen the scope of the 
perils with which the Union was threatened by that force. 

The territories west of the Alleghany were now becoming 

* Upon the Resolutions of '98 Gouverneur Morris remarks : " During 
the administration of Mr. Adams, Virginia was almost in open revolt 
against the national authority, merely because a Yankee and not a Vir- 
ginian was president." — Life, vol. iii., p, 196. The tone of this remark 
indicates a bitterness of sectional feeling in the writer, which is not less 
noteworthy than the remark itself. As to the extravagance of Mr. 
Adams' policy, Hamilton, a wiser witness than Morris, is strikingly ex- 
plicit. — Hamilton's Works, vol. vi., p. 307. 

f The opponents of Mr. Jefferson, in the New England States, re- 
garded his election very much as the extreme men of the South re- 
garded the election of Mr. Lincoln in 18G0. When Jefferson was first a 
candidate in 1796, Oliver Wolcott, of Connecticut, declared that his 
election would justify the secession of New England. " I will say that 
if French agency places Mr. Jefferson in the seat of the chief magistrate 
(and if he is placed there, it wUl be by their intriguei^) the government 
of the United States ought at that moment to discontinue its opera- 
tions, and let those who have placed him there take him to themselves : 
for although I am sensible, by our last revolution, of the evils which 
attend one, I sincerely declare that I wish the Northern States would 
separate from the Southern the moment that event shall take place, 
and never to unite with them, except it shall be necessary for military 
operations." — Oibbs' Administration of Washington and Adams, vol. i., 
p. 408. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 31 

occupied by an active and restless population. Pressed upon 
the north by England, and upon the south by Spain, the new 
communities of the West were courted by agents of both these 
powers. Great Britain sought to detach the West from the 
Union by promises of assistance in compelling Spain to open 
the lower Mississippi to Western enterprise and commerce ; 
Spain, by offers to relax in favor of the West the severity of 
her colonial regulations, and to divide with it her monopoly 
of the splendid traffic of the Mexican Gulf. The Western 
people were by no means insensible to these advances.* And 
the enterprise of Burr, although it failed of success, pointed 
plainly to a new peril for the incipient Union — a peril which 
Mr. Jefferson by no means conceived himself finally to have 
conjured, but simply to have modified when the rupture of 
the peace of Amiens induced the First Consul of France to 
abandon his projects upon Louisiana, the cession of which he 
had obtained from Spain, and to transfer the magnificent terri- 
tory of the Mississippi to the Union.f 

The political opponents of Mr. Jefferson, in the Eastern 
States regarded the annexation of Louisiana as an ample justi- 
fication of the secession of those States. 



* Mr. Blount, a senator from Tennessee, was expelled from the 
Senate in 1797, for conspiring with British agents against the Spanish 
possessions. 

f Mr. Jefferson considered himself to have done much for his country- 
even in the event of a separate American republic growing up in the 
Louisiana territory. " If it should become the great interest of these 
nations to separate from this, if their happiness should depend upon it 
so strongly as to indtice them to go through that convulsion, why 
should the Atlantic States dread it ? . . . The future inhabitants of the 
Atlantic and Mississippi States will be our sons. We leave them in 
distinct but bordering establishments. We think we see their happi- 
ness in the Union, and we wish it. Events may prove it otherwise ; 
but if they see their interest in separation, why should we take sides 
with our Atlantic rather than our Mississippi descendants ? It is the 
elder and the younger son differing. God bless them both, and keep 
them in union, if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better." 
— Jeff&rson'a Works, vol. iv., p. 499. 



32 LIFE OP GEN. GEOBGE B. McCLELLAN. 

Propositions which had been entertained towards the end of 
the administration of John Adams, by distinguished JSTew Eng- 
land statesmen, for the formation of an "Eastern Confederacy," 
to be bounded by the Hudson or the Delaware, and to be 
exempt from the operations of the " infamous Virginia policy," 
were revived and seriously discussed.* It was but natural that 
a party which had vainly endeavored to retain power in a con- 
federacy confined to the States of the Atlantic, should shrink 
from the possibilities of a future so immense and indefinite as 
was thrown open to the politics of America by the acquisition 
of a new empire beyond the Alleghanies. The States of the 
South, on the other hand, dominant in the federal councils, and 
seeing in the geographical position of the new territory a guar- 
anty of vast and direct advantages to accrue to themselves 
from its acquisition, hailed the treaty of cession as loudly as 
the people of the West. 

The sectional hostility thus developed, was still further em- 
bittered by the measures which were adopted by the govern- 

* Randall's Life of Jefferson, (vol. iii., p. 863 ;) Appendix, No. XXIV. 
In reply to a letter of inquiry from Harrison Gray Otis and others. 
President Adams wrote, Dec. 30, 1828 : " This design had been formed 
in the winter of 1803-4, immediately after, and as a consequence of the 
acquisition of Louisiana. . . . The plan was so far matured, that the 
proposal had been made to an individual to permit himself, at the 
proper time, to be placed at the head of the military movements which 
it was foreseen would be necessary for carrying it into execution.' 
President Adams, in a subsequent letter to Gov. Plumer, states, that 
"three projects of boundary" for the New England Confederacy had 
been prepared. These were, " 1. If possible, the Potomac. 2. The Sus- 
quehanna. 3. The Hudson." Plumer was an avowed disunionist. He 
wrote to New Hampshire from Washington, Jan. 19, 1804 : " What do 
you wish your senators and representatives to do here ? We have no 
part in Jefferson, and no inheritance in Virginia. Shall we return to 
our own homes, sit under our own vines and fig-trees, and be separate 
from the slaveholders ?" He records, also, in his journal, a conversation 
with Timothy Pickering, in which the latter spoke of disunion as de- 
sirable ; and when it was suggested that Washington had feared and 
deprecated such an event, added by way of assent and of criticism, 
" Yes, the fear was a ghost t/iat for a long time haunted the imaginctn 
'tion of that old gentleman !" 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 33 

ment of Mr. Jefferson in defence of the American flag and of 
neutral rights, against the Commercial Decrees of the Emperor 
Napoleon, and the Orders in Council of the British govern- 
ment. New England regarded the Embargo Act of 1807, as 
a combined attack of the Southern and Western upon the 
Eastern States ; " domestic convulsions " were threatened as 
its consequence by New England senators at Washington ; 
and although that act was soon repealed, such was the vehe- 
mence of the sectional feeling which it had combined with 
other causes to excite, that Mr. Quincy, of Massachusetts, in 
opposing, four years afterwards, the admission of Louisiana 
as a State into the Union, was called to order for making the 
deliberate declaration, that by the admission of Louisiana the 
Union would be virtually dissolved.* 

From the peace of Versailles to the annexation of the Loui- 
siana territory, exactly twenty years had elapsed. During 
that time, the first experiment of union in America had utterly 
failed ; and the real history of the second experiment was now 
about to begin under conditions and in circumstances seriously 
unhke those amid which its basis had been laid. 

The overthrow of the Federal party coinciding in point of 
time with the acquisition of the vast territories of the Missis- 
sippi, had thrown open a new continent to the progress of 
new principles. The great development of American com- 
merce and industry now began, and with it the growth of 
such a material prosperity as was calculated to educate coming 
generations in an increasing indifference to questions of pure 
politics. A tendency to centralization, involving in itself the 
seminal principle of absolutism, was rapidly to become para- 
mount in the governments of the Union, and that efficient dis- 
tribution of authorities among powers limiting, controlHng, and 

* " It will free the States from tlieir moral obligations ; and, as it will 
be the rigbt of all, so it wiU be the duty of some to prepare for separa- 
tion, amicably if they can, violently if they must." — Journal, H. of i?., 
January 14, 1811. 



34 LIFE OP GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 

supporting one another, upon which the wisest framers of the 
American Constitution had relied for the stability of their 
work, was to be gradually undermined both in the practice of 
affairs, and in the affections of the people. 

The results of Mr. Jefferson's foreign policy ripened, under 
his successor, into the second war with England. The States 
which had most strenuously opposed that policy and upon 
which its previous consequences had most heavily weighed, 
were roused by the crowning calamity of war into a fever of 
indignation and disgust. Influential orators, upon the plat- 
form and in the pulpit ; able writers in the press ; and men 
whose official station gave special weight to their words, 
united in calling upon the people of New England to refuse 
their support to the Federal government in the prosecution of 
" an unholy and unrighteous war." The menace of disunion 
was revived. The triumph of the party of Jefferson was at- 
tributed to that article of the Constitution which authorized a 
partial representation of the Southern negroes in Congress, 
and the institution of slavery was for the first time made the 
object of fierce sectional denunciations for a political purpose. 

Early in the year 1814, a project which had been first pub- 
licly advanced in 1783, in the Congress of the Confederation, 
^nd which on several subsequent occasions had temporarily 
occupied the minds of leading men in "New England, was 
carried into effect. A convention of delegates from all the 
New England States met at Hartford, in Connecticut, in re- 
sponse to a call from the legislature of Massachusetts, " for 
the purpose of devising jjroper measures to procure the united 
efforts of the commercial States to obtain such amendments 
and explanations of the Constitution as might secure them 
from further evils."* In this convention, among other things, 

* " Men of the North ! will you go on and for twelve long weary 
years see the commerce of the nation bound, her agriculture arrested, 
her coffers lavished, and her glory trampled in the dust by the very men 
whom Southern slaves ham lifted into office?' —Connecticut Journal, 1802. 



LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 35 

it was proposed to deprive the slave States of the partial re- 
presentation of their slaves and to make a two-thirds vote' of 
both houses of Congress necessary to the admission of any- 
new State into the Union. The question of the dissolution of 
the Union was fully and ably discussed, and the general con- 
clusion to which the convention came was, that if the politi- 
cal power of the agricultural and exporting States could be so 
reduced under the Constitution as to deliver the commercial 
States from the fear of a preponderance hostile to their inter- 
ests it would be expedient that the Union should continue to 
exist. But " whenever it shall appear," said the convention 
in their report, " that the causes of our calamities are radical 
and permanent, a separation, by mutual arrangement, will be 
preferable to an alliance by constraint among nominal friends 
but real enemies." 

The action of the Hartford Convention was considered at 
the time, both by those who approved and by those who dis- 
approved it, as a distinct and deliberate movement towards the 
disruption of the Union and the formation of a new Confede- 
racy. John Adams treated it as the retaliation upon the 
Southern States of the conduct of the latter during his own 
administration.* Harrison Gray Otis, of Massachusetts, who 
neither then, nor at any subsequent time, could be regarded 
as an enemy of slavery upon moral or social grounds, assumed 
the public responsibility of this ultimatum addressed to the 
South ; and Gouverneur Morris, who had finally revised the 
phraseology of the Federal Constitution in the convention of 
1787, openly encouraged New England to persevere in the 
course upon which she had entered, declared that Kew York 
must join with her, and maintained that the question of 

Such extracts might be indefinitely multiplied, but one will suffice to 
show that the true animus of tliese early sectional assaults upon tlie 
institution of slavery was less detestation of slavery itself than jeal- 
ousy of the political power which it was supposed to confer upon the 
slaveholder. 

* Life and Works of John Adams, vol. x., p. 48» 



36 LITE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

boundary to be solved was " the Delaware, the Susquehanna, 
or the Potomac."* 

On the other hand De Witt Clinton, of New York, de- 
nounced the convention as " treasonable," as threatening the 
" explosion of civil war," and simply giving vent and voice to 
the long-cherished designs of men who had attempted, at a 
previous time, to enlist Alexander Hamilton as the leader of 
the armies of a new Confederacy of the North. 

The peace of Ghent arrested the progress of the events 
which must otherwise have followed from the action of the 
New England Convention. It was no longer necessary for 
the legislatures of the New England States, in the language 
of Governor Trumbull, of Connecticut,! "to interpose their 
protecting shield between the rights and liberties of the peo- 
ple, and the assumed power of the general government." The 
Hartford demonstration, which might have been, and threat- 
ened to be, the Jeu de Paume of the American Union, subsi- 
ded into a factious and sectional manoeuvre, which was con- 
sidered to be more discreditable to those concerned in it than 
it was dangerous to the country. An " era of good feelings " 
set in, and men of patriotic minds congratulated themselves 
upon the prospect of a real and permanent consolidation of 
the Union in the sense of those illustrious men by whom that 
phrase had first been used. 

But five years had not passed, when the question of prepon- 
derance in the Union was once more raised, in such a temper 
and upon such issues, as proved how vain had been all the ef- 
forts of statesmanship to make the principles of the American 
Constitution familiar, and of patriotism to make them dear to 
the popular mind. In the year 1819, the State of Missouri, a 
sovereignty erected out of the territory of Louisiana, demand- 
ed admission into the Union. The State had been largely peo- 

* Spark's Life of Gouverneur Morris, vol. iii., p. 319. See, also, Let- 
ter to E. Benson, Ih., p. 294. 
f Messages of Governors of Connecticut. — Fowler. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 37 

pled by emigrants from the South, the institution of slavery 
existed within its borders, and the Southern States, no doubt, 
believed that its admission as a slave State would strengthen 
their own section in its relations with the Federal Govern- 
ment. This the Northern States also believed, and were de- 
termined accordingly to make the abolition of slavery a prece- 
dent condition of the admission of the new State. A sharp 
and positive division of Congress and of the country upon a 
strictly geographical line was the inevitable consequence of 
this antagonism. The questions of how a new State could be 
constituted, and of how far the interference of Congress in the 
domestic institutions of a new State could be lawfully pushed, 
were deeply considered and angrily debated at this time. But 
that the real issue made was an issue of sectional preponder- 
ance, is shown by the fact, that even after the question of the 
power of Congress had been practically settled by the passage 
of a resolution excluding slavery from all States to be formed 
out of territory lying north of 36° 30', the ISTorthern members 
in the House of Representatives, by a considerable majority, 
still refused to assent to the admission of Missouri, which lay 
to the south of that line. 

The State was finally admitted, after more than two years of 
hot and perilous controversy, by a majority of no more than 
four votes in a House of Representatives of nearly two hun- 
dred members. 

One man, at least, in America, fully comprehended the mag- 
nitude of the danger which lowered upon his country from the 
clouds of this fierce controversy. " The Missouri question," 
wrote Jefferson, on the 13th of April, 1820, to his old friend, 
disciple, and correspondent, William Short, " has aroused and 

filled me with alarm The coincidence of a marked 

principle, moral and political, with a geographical line, once 
conceived, I feared would never more be obliterated from the 
mind ; that it would be recurring on every occasion, and re- 
newing irritations, until it would kindle such mutual and mor- 



38 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

tal hatred as to render separation preferable to eternal discord. 
I have been among the most sanguine in believing that our 
Union would be of long duration. I now doubt it much." 

So deeply impressed was Jefferson with the fears which he 
has here recorded, that, during the remainder of his life, he 
lost no opportunity of urging upon Virginia and the other 
Southern States the importance of preparing themselves for 
the exigency of a great revolutionary change.* The third 
President of the Union lived long enough to find in his own 
experience a striking illustration of the vanity of human plans 
and wishes. Out of his two great political achievements — the 
expansion of the territorial area of the Republic, and the en- 
largement of American democracy — had come up the fearful 
perils which so moved his mind and shook his heart. But for 
his successful diplomacy the question of the admission of Mis- 
souri had never perhaps been raised. But for his triumphant 
political theories that question, when raised, might have been 
debated in a calmer, more statesmanlike, and wiser €one. But 
the ranks of public life were even then filling up with recruits 
of a less noble type than that of the men whose counsels had 
originally made the Union possible. The discussion became a 
contest. It was marked on both sides by a more general dis- 
regard of mutual obhgations and a more exasperating tone of 
sectional animosity than had ever before predominated in such 
a conflict. It came to an end, however,' peacefully, and left the 
Union still un shattered. 

But the little children of that time are the mature men of 
to-day. The earliest impressions of the generation which pre- 
ceded them had been received from men who had fought to- 
gether the battles of American Independence, and had labored 

* He revived liis favorite policy of non-intercourse, and especially- 
warned his Soutliern fellow-citizens against sending their ?ons to the 
North " to imbibe opinions and principles in discord with those of their 
own country." — Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellaniea of Jefferson, 
vol. iv., p. 342. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 39 

together at the fabric of American Union. Their own earliest 
impressions were to be received from men inflamed to mutual 
dislike and distrust by an angry sectional contest. The gen- 
eration which preceded them had learned in boyhood to merge 
the old provincial pride of the Carolinian and the New Eng- 
lander, the New Yorker and the Virginian, in the new and 
grander pride of the American. They in their boyhood were 
to learn that the Carolinian had claims which the New Eng- 
lander refused to recognize, that the Virginian had been de- 
nounced by the New Yorker as an enemy of human rights and 
a scandal to the American name. 

The process of national crystallization had thus received a 
shock, the eifects of which must necessarily long outlast the 
immediate oscillation of the system. 

This was the more certain, that great and profound changes 
were going on in the character of the American people, and 
in the direction of the national destinies. This was more par- 
ticularly the case at the South. The development of the cot- 
ton interest, which dates from the first years only of the nine- 
teenth century, had been most powerfully stimulated by the 
opening of the western territory of the State of Georgia, and 
by the rapid settlement of the magnificent valley of the lower 
Mississippi. Arkansas was already pressing for admission to 
the Union, and this superb State, with Louisiana, Mississippi, 
and Alabama, seemed to offer to the people of the South, and 
to the institution of slavery, a new, imperial, and inexhaustible 
future. A party, small at first in numbers, but formidable by 
the fanatical and visionary character of the policy which it pro- 
posed to itself, began to be formed in the Southern States, 
which looked to disunion and to the constitution of a Southern 
Confederacy, precisely as the Gores and the Pickerings of an 
earlier day had looked to disunion and the constitution of an 
Eastern Confederacy. 

The increasing power of the Northern States in Congress, 
and the development of manufactures in those States, which 



40 • LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. MoCLELLAN. 

naturally kept pace with the development of agriculture at the 
South, led the pohticians of the North to afford this party of 
disunion at the South the immense moral assistance of a new 
sectional issue. 

This issue was seriously raised, for. the first time, in 1824, 
upon the right of Congress to estabUsh a tariff for the protec- 
tion of domestic manufactures. It was again and more seri- 
ously made in 1828, when a new tariff was introduced into 
Congress. 

The legislatures of the Southern States protested against the 
act, as the legislatures of Northern States had protested against 
the embargo of 1807. By the legislature of Georgia the act 
was denounced as having " already disturbed the Union and 
endangered the public tranquillity, weakened the confidence 
of the States in the Federal government, and diminished the 
affection of large masses of the people to the Union itself." 

Mr. Berrien, afterwards eminent in the national councils, 
commented, in the legislature of the same State, upon the act 
as tending to precipitate the greatest trial to which the insti- 
tutions of America could possibly be subjected. He implored 
all patriotic men to shrink from forcing upon the country 
" that experiment which shall test the competency of the gov- 
ernment to preserve internal peace, whenever a question vital- 
ly affecting the bond which unites us as one people shall come 
to be solemnly agitated between the sovereign members of the 
confederacy," * 

South Carohna, in which commonwealth the sentiment of 
dislike to the Union had, from reasons of local origin and ap- 
phcation, made more progress than in any other State either 
at the South or at the North, assumed the leadership of the 
Southern opposition to the principle of the Federal tariff for 
protection. 

Before the war of the Revolution, South Carolina had been 

* Fowler's Sectional Controversy, p. 94. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 41 

relatively the wealthiest of the British American Colonies. 
The commerce of Charleston had been more important than 
that of Boston, Philadelphia, or New York. But notwith- 
standing the development of the cotton culture in which she 
found herself doubly interested, as a producer and as a factor, 
South Carolina had been gradually losing under the Union the 
prosperity which she had enjoyed under the crown. It might 
be easy to show that this fact ought to have been traced, in 
the main, to causes quite independent of the Union. But po- 
litical economy is a science of modern origin, which has not 
yet made itself respected even in the most enlightened coun- 
tries of the old world, and the people of South Carolina in 
1828-9 were easily convinced that they had sacrificed to the 
Union much more than they had gained from it. This con- 
viction operated upon their minds precisely as Henry Clay did 
not hesitate in his plea against nullification to assert that such 
a conviction would operate upon the minds of the New Eng- 
land and Middle States : " Let these States feel that they are 
the victims of a mistaken policy ; let those vast portions of 
our country despair of any favorable change, and then, in- 
deed, we might tremble for the continuance of the Union." * 

The people of South Carolina believed themselves to be the 
victims of a mistaken policy, and they acted as the people of 
any other considerable section of the country, laboring under 
a similar belief, might have acted. They protested against the 
execution of the obnoxious laws, and having protested in vain 
they proceeded to make sc show of force in maintenance of 
their protest. 

President Jackson met these demonstrations with such a 
display of the Federal power as the means at his disposal per- 

* Mr. Clayton, of Delaware, afterwards Secretary of State of the 
United States, was still more explicit. In 1833 that senator did not feax 
to say in his place in tlie Senate, "the government cannot be kept to- 
gether if the principle of protection is to be discarded in our policy, and 
I would pause before I surrendered that principle even to save the 
Visiois."— Benton's Thirty Years' View, vol. i., p. 331. 



42 LIFE OP GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

mitted, and applied to Congress for authority to reinforce 
those means. The authority which he asked was conferred 
upon him, but he was dispensed from the painful and perilous 
duty of employing it, by a timely congressional compromise, 
acceptable to South Carolina, and honorable to the govern- 
ment. 

The party of disunion throughout the South was, at this 
time, too weak to afford any substantial support to the ex- 
treme views of South Carolina, but the most moderate South- 
ern men, and those Avho looked with most disfavor upon the 
attitude of that State, admitted that had the sword been 
drawn by the President it would have been impossible to avert 
a general war between the combined Southern States and the 
Federal government.* 

The election of Mr. Yan Buren to the Presidency in 1836, 
avowedly as " a Northern man with Southern principles," af- 
forded a striking illustration of the prominence which strictly 
sectional issues were rapidly assuming in American politics. 

These issues were now about to be formidably influenced 
by the direct interference of an organized body of Northern 
men with the most distinctive social institution of the South. 

A single man, William Lloyd Garrison, a man of humble 
origin and of fortunes as humble, animated by a fanatical 
hatred of slavery, and profoundly disgusted by the indiffer- 
ence with which that institution was regarded by the great 
masses of the Northern people, devoted himself to the task of 
setting on fire the moral instincts of the Northern people, and 
became the Hermit Peter of a Northern crusade against the 
" sum of human villianies." f 

* Speech of B. Watkins Leigh, of Virginia, in U. S. Senate, 1833. 

f The " Liberator " newspaper was founded by Garrison in Boston, in 
1830. It was published in a mean form and at a small expense. When 
the government of Georgia placed a price on Garrison's head three 
years afterwards, Mr. Harrison Gray Otis, then mayor of Boston, truly in 
formed the governor of Georgia that the publisher of the Liberator was 
an obscure person in a garret, of whom he had never so much as heard. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 43 

This man was a stranger to all political parties and combi- 
nations. He denounced the Constitution as a " covenant with 
death, and a compact with hell," because, as he had the ca- 
pacity to perceive, and the candor to admit, it recognized the 
existence of slavery and guaranteed the rights of the slave- 
holder. 

For this he was persecuted as a political blasphemer by the 
people of the North, reviled in the press, and assaulted by 
well-dressed mobs. 

But this did not prevent the people of the South from re- 
garding his course as an indication of Northern sentiment, or 
Southern fanatics from skillfully employing his most inflam- 
matory harangues to encourage the growth of an intense 
sectional feeling of hostility to the North and to Northern men. 

The then recent emancipation of the British West India 
slaves * gave a great impulse to this anti-slavery movement at 
the North. The flame of a succussful enthusiasm in old Eno-- 
land communicated itself to the kindling enthusiasm of New 
England. Men who had " drunk delight of battle " on the 
platforms of Great Britain, the Yarangians of the guard of 
Wilberforce, eagerly passed the Atlantic in quest of a new 
field of conflict. 

The question of slavery soon began to fasten' itself upon the 
politics of the Republic. Petitions seeking the abolition of 
slavery in the Federal District of Columbia, were introduced 
into Congress by members from the North. 

The reception of these petitions was opposed by members 
from the South, on the ground that they violated at once the 
rights of the States by which the District had been ceded to 
the nation, and the principles of reciprocal comity and for- 
bearance on which the Union itself was founded. The oppo- 
sition was at first successful.! But the advocates of abolition 
returned again and again to the charge. 

* August 1,1830. 

\ Resolutions introduced into the House of Representatives by Mr. H. 



44 LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 

On the 20tli of December, 1837, just fifty years after the 
adoption of the Federal Constitution of the Union, motions 
were prepared by Mr. Rhett, of South CaroUna, declaring it 
" to be exiDcdient that the Union should be dissolved ;" and 
calling for " a committee of two from each State to report 
upon the best means of peaceably dissolving it." These mo- 
tions were intended to be presented as amendments to a mo- 
tion made by Mr. Slade, of Vermont, to refer a certain petition 
to a committee with instructions " to report a bill abolishing 
slavery in the District of Columbia." They were not, how- 
ever, presented, the original motion, after a hot and dangerous 
debate, being defeated by a two-thirds vote. But from this 
time onward the question was destined perpetually to recur in 
the halls of Congress. It had become complicated with the 
right of petition in the abstract, of which the venerable John 
Quincy Adams, a man hardly to be called an aboUtionist, but 
vehement in point of character, and of a mind as narrow as it 
was vigorous, constituted himself the especial champion. The 
intemperance with which his position on this point was assailed 
by many of the Southern members, inflamed his passions, in- 
tensified his hereditary hatred of the South, and envenomed 
the sharpness of his rhetoric ; and the debate upon this sub- 
ject rapidly degenerated into gladiatorial conflicts, certain to 
exasperate the pubhc sentiment in both sections of the Union. 

While the moral relations of the people of the North and 
the South were in this angry and perilous state, influences most 
unfavorable to harmony and union were at work upon their 
political relations also. A great financial crisis in 1837 was 
followed by a contest, which rapidly assumed a strongly sec- 
tional aspect, upon questions of financial policy. The altered 

C. Pinckney, of South Carolina, were passed May 25, 1836, declaring 
that Congress " ought not to interfere in any way with slavery in the 
District of Columbia/' and ordering all papers in any way relating " to 
the abolition of slavery to be laid upon the table." These resolutions 
were adopted by a vote of 117 to 68. — Foicler'a Sectional Controversy, 
p. 118. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. MoCLELLAN. 45 

circumstances of the country and of the world were about to 
invest this contest with a character entirely new. The pros- 
perity of the Southern slaveholding States was about to re- 
ceive a fresh and powerful impulse, the force and the results 
of which have only been fully revealed by the events of the 
existing war. 

In 1845, the project of reannexing to the United States the 
magnificent Republic of Texas, formed out of territory origi- 
nally included in the cession of Louisiana by France, but re- 
ceded by the United States, in 1819, to Mexico, awakened a 
political tempest violent beyond all previous example. The 
cry of " Texas or Disunion" was raised in many parts of the 
South, while the legislatures and governors of some of the 
N'orthern States emphatically declared that the annexation of 
Texas would be a practical dissolution of the Union. All the 
passions before enlisted on the subject of slavery burst forth 
again upon Congress and the country with fresh fury. Propo- 
sitions, looking to the abolition of the slave representation of 
the South, and even to the abolition of slavery itself within 
the Southern States, by congressional action, were introduced 
into Congress. These propositions were indorsed by State 
authority on the one side, and denounced by State authority 
on the other. Texas, however, was finally annexed to the 
American Union amid a tempest of moral indignation at the 
North, which became still more vehement upon the consequent 
declaration of war with Mexico. In many parts of the North, 
and particularly in New England, it was found to be prac- 
tically impossible to raise volunteers for this war. The South 
and the West regarded the war with favor, and feelings of 
sectional jealousy and distrust developed themselves in the 
armies of the Republic actually in the field. 

Under the administration of President Polk, the Southern 
views of financial policy won a substantial triumph in the pas- 
sage of the tariff of 1846. In this tariff, the principle of rev- 
enue was substituted for that of protection, to the manifest 



46 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

advantage of the great agricultural States of the South ; while 
almost at the same moment, the Northern States succeeded in 
demonstrating their determination to exclude the institution 
of slavery from those territories of the Union which were still 
in the process of development into States. So many new 
States had been created since the annexation of Louisiana, 
that the traditional dignity which had invested the original 
State sovereignties was already perceptibly wearing away. 
Nothing is more easy of development than the sentiment of 
provincial pride, which, in its origin, is simply pride of family ; 
but time and the light of history are necessary to invest this 
pride with respectability and authority in the eyes of mankind. 
As State after State was added to the Union, the general pride 
of Americans in America must inevitably have overgrown and 
absorbed these sentiments of local patriotism, had not circum- 
stances, as we have seen, unfortunately tended to group the 
States into two great sections, by alienations of temper and 
conflicts of interest. 

When it became necessary, in 1846, to make arrangements 
for aggregating with the dominions of the Union the splendid 
territories about to be ceded by Mexico, a question at once 
arose whether the industrial institutions of the South should be 
suflered to establish themselves upon those territories. Mr. 
Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, introduced into Congress an amend- 
ment to a bill proposed by Mr. McKay, of North Carolina, for 
making peace with Mexico, which amendment provided for 
the exclusion of slavery from all territories to be acquired by 
the Union as a consequence of the peace. 

The amendment of Mr. Wilmot was finally rejected in 
March, 1847, by a majority of five votes only, in a House of 
one hundred and ninety-nine members. There can be no 
doubt that the resolute support which the amendment of Mr. 
Wilmot received from the people, the press, and the legisla- 
tures of Northern States, was largely the result of a growing 
and genuine detestation of slavery. That institution had long 






LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 47 

since disappeared from Northern life. Men who recurred to 
the earlier annals of the Republic, found therein abundant 
proofs that the founders of the Union cordially disliked the 
institution of slavery, and looked upon it as an anomaly which, 
in the natural course of things, must soon disappear from the 
social order of America. That, in the sixtieth year of the his- 
tory of the Union, this odious system should not only persist 
in the original States of the South, but should be extending 
itself over new territories, and claiming the protection of the 
general government, not for its maintenance alone, but for its 
progress, revolted the honest sensibilities and the thoughtful 
convictions of thousands of honest and thoughtful men. Un- 
happily for the peace and permanence of the Union, the in- 
tense moral indignation which was thus aroused, could only 
find expression through such an illegitimate sectional antagon- 
ism in politics, as necessarily excited the people of the South 
into the belief that their rights, their interests, and their honor 
were alike in jeopardy. 

The imperial resources of Texas had immensely reinforced 
the slaveholding States. A vast and fortunate future seemed 
opening before them. Before the flush of the visions which 
rose thence upon the mind of the South, the beauty and value 
of the Union began to pale. 

The tone of American politics had for many years been nei- 
ther elevated nor inspiring. At the North, men of passionate 
natures and vivid imaginations, recoiling from the corruptions 
or wearied with the tameness of partisan life and partisan 
ideas, had begun to examine into the necessity of upholding a 
Constitution which tolerated the existence of human slavery 
within the scope of its sanctions, and to agitate in the hearts 
of the people the revolutionary hope of a reformed Republic, 
rising like the commonwealth of England in the vision of John 
Milton, to a youth and a glory clean of this accursed thing. 
At the South, men of the same type, infuriated by what they 
regarded as the moral impertinence of Northern philanthropy, 



48 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

disgusted with the hypocrisy of men who made that philan- 
thropy the mask of sectional selfishness and personal ambition, 
or inflamed with dreams of a grander policy and a loftier fate 
in the future of a new and more military confederacy, began 
to question the value of a Constitution which had certainly 
failed to command universal respect for its provisions, and to 
plan the disruption of a Union from which they had ceased to 
hope either for individual distinction or for general repose. 

Events were rapidly flowing as these men in either section 
would have them. One after another, the great ecclesiastical 
bodies began to divide upon the issue of the toleration of sla- 
very ; it being manifestly impossible that men should continue 
to act together in the name of a common religious faith after 
it had become clear to any great proportion of their number 
that God requiredit of them to treat their fellow-believers as 
criminals of the deepest dye. Commercial conventions of the 
Southern States, such as had been stigmatized during the 
earlier days of the Republic as " young Congresses," began 
to be held. The proposition to admit California into the 
Union brought the two sections again into collision. 

All the questions which had divided the opinions, all the 
interests which had fired the passions of the American people 
for twenty years, were engaged in the fierce debate which now 
arose. The marvellous golden wealth of the new dominion 
over which the angry sections contended, acted upon the im- 
aginations of men as the discoveries of Columbus and the con- 
quests of Cortez had acted upon the mind of Europe four cen- 
turies before. It was in vain that the chief statesmen of the 
Republic invoked the influences and appealed to the sanctions 
of an elder day. They were enabled, indeed, by supreme ex- 
ertions, to accomplish a new compromise, to achieve the ad- 
mission of California into the Union, with a Constitution pro- 
hibiting slavery, and to impose upon the Northern States a 
new and more stringent law enforcing the return of fugitives 
from slavery. But the people of the South chafed against the 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN^. 49 

former measure as fixing a national brand upon their social or- 
der, and excluding them from the unreserved enjoyment of all 
their rights of property, in a region won by contributions of 
their own blood and their own treasure ; while the people of 
the North revolted from the latter measure as an outrage upon 
their moral instincts, and an insult to the spirit of the age. 

These antagonistic emotions rapidly became the life and im- 
pulse of two profound and hostile political movements. At 
the South the purpose of Southern independence, at the North 
the restriction of slavery, now began to enlist the strength and 
mould the future of either section. Such was the general pros- 
perity of the peoj^le, however, and so gradual is the a^jparent 
advance of the most formidable revolutions, that neither at the 
North nor at the South was the tremendous power of these 
divergent forces at all appreciated. 

No steps of importance were taken in either section to pre- 
pare for the fearful possibilities which were so swiftly ripening 
into certainty. 

A tardy attempt to arrest the progress of disruption was 
made in 1854, by Mr. Douglas, of Illinois, a man of extraor- 
dinary abilities, trained in demagogic arts, and in no wise averse 
from their use, but filled with an earnest apprehension of the 
perils of the country, and animated by a patriotic desire to 
conjure away the coming storm. Mr. Douglas introduced into 
the Senate a bill repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820, 
by which slavery had been excluded from the territories lying 
north of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes of north latitude, 
and referring the question of the establishment or the prohibi- 
tion of slavery in all the territories of the Union to the people 
of those territories themselves. The purpose of this bill un- 
doubtedly was to allay the passions alike of the North and of 
the South, by adopting a principle in regard to the occupation 
of the national domain which should relieve the States in Con- 
gress from the dangerous necessity of meeting in consultation 
upon the issues by which the nation had already been shaken 



60 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

to its centre. But these issues had now passed out of the 
reach of political measures into the passionate life of either 
section. 

Removed from the halls of Congress and th^ conflicts of 
opinion, they were sure to be raised again at once under con- 
ditions more formidable still to the public peace, and to pre- 
cipitate collisions of force. 

The anti-slavery sentiment of the ISTorth had now penetrated 
the great religious masses of the IS'orthern people. It had 
thoroughly colored the dominant literature of l!^ew England, 
and from New England as a centre it had radiated throughout 
the free States. The ecclesiastical and educational systems of 
New England had been reproduced from the Hudson to the 
Mississippi. The social and intellectual life of the Middle and 
Western States was mainly fed from the colleges, the semina- 
ries, the printing-presses of New England. The sanctions of 
the ancient theology of New England, the illuminations of the 
modern philosophy of New England, contending at a hundred 
points beside, combined their forces against all further tolera- 
tion of the existence of slavery within the borders of the 
model Republic. 

Another influence of the first importance wrought to the 
same end. The recoil of the revolutionary wave of 1848 from 
the shores of Europe had flung upon the soil of the New 
World an immense emigration from the Continental States, and 
especially from the German Confederation. Such was the 
force of this influx that within ten years from the triumph of 
the reaction in Europe the city of New York alone contained 
a German population larger than that of any capital in Ger- 
many, excepting Vienna and Berlin. The population of Ger- 
man birth in all the Union, which in 1820 had fallen short of 
eight thousand in the whole, in 1860 had swollen to more than 
a million and a half of souls, and of this enormous number 
nearly a million were transferred to America during the six 
years which intervened between the revolutions of 1848 in 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McqLELLAN. 51 

Europe, and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. No- 
where in Europe had the revolutionary spirit of 1848 taken 
upon itself so hot and radical a temper as in Germany. Con- 
tempt of all things established and venerable had become to it 
a kind of religion. Thirty years of a stupid and selfish bu- 
reaucracy had made the very names of law and order odious 
to it. The pressure of social inequalities, exasperated by un- 
enlightened legislation, had generated in the wildest and most 
passionate theories of social organization. Inflamed and em- 
bittered by defeat, the leaders of the German Democracy, 
self-exiled or banished to America, could scarcely be expected 
to treat the established Constitution of the United States more 
respectfully than the promised Constitution of Prussia. The 
great names of American history, the great principles of 
American polity, were as utterly destitute of authority and of 
influence over them and over the multitudes who swarmed 
with them into the promised land beyond the Atlantic, as the 
heroes of the Nibelungen Lied and the positions of the Prag- 
matic Sanction. It was enough for them to know that slavery 
was the converse of freedom, and that the social system of the 
South conferred upon a certain order of men special privileges 
and something very like an aristocratic position. 

They became at once the deadly, vehement, and determined 
enemies of slavery itself, and of all guaranties, compromises, 
and concessions, transmitted from the past or imagined in the 
present for the protection of slavery. 

Nor was the intensity of their enmity diminished by the 
consideration that the fairest and most fertile lands of the new 
continent trended southward and westward, beyond the Mis- 
sissippi, beyond the Missouri, towards the temperate plains of 
the Indian Territory, the borders of Arkansas, and the distant 
opulence of Texas. The stream of Western emigration soon 
found that its most profitable course led it away from the fur- 
ther shores of the great lakes, and below the parallel which 



52 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

the compromise of 1820 had fixed upon as the terminal line of 
slave occupation. 

Meanwhile the prosperity of the South had been advan- 
cing with gigantic strides. Slavery no longer languished 
along the Atlantic seaboard, but, swollen into a lusty and ad- 
venturous life, was dreaming of new domains, and asserting 
itself a legitimate inheritor of the earth. ^ 

The gold discoveries of California and Australia coinciding 
substantially in point of time with the adoption of the principle 
of Free Trade in the commercial legislation of England, and 
with liberal modifications in the commercial legislation of the 
United States, communicated a tremendous impulse to the 
commerce and the industry of mankind. It has been estimated 
that the commerce of the world more than doubled itself in 
the decade between 1850 and 1860. It is certain that the ag- 
gregate wealth of the United States alone, during that time, 
increased in a still greater ratio. In no region of the world 
did this sudden and immense development of human activity 
make itself more immediately, in few regions of the world did 
it make itself more profitably felt than in the slaveholding 
States of America. From the year 1847 to the year 1860, the 
civilized world may be said to have been in a conspiracy to 
stimulate the employment of slave labor in the cotton-growing 
States of the Union. While immigration and individual en- 
terprise were sowing States broadcast over the prairies of the 
Northwest, commerce was inflaming the mind of the Southern 
planter with visions of indefinite empire, and of a " potentiality 
of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice." 

The South, which in the main had been almost stationary 
during the earlier portion of the century, pressed forward in 
tke race of prosperity during these eventful years with an im- 
pulse and an energy which are far from having been generally 
recognized, but which cannot be overlooked by him who would 
form a just and practical conception of the causes which led to 
the great national catastrophe of 1861, or a reasonable estimate 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 53 

of the resources which were brought by the South to the pros- 
ecution of the war. 

The repeal of the Missouri Compromise throwing open the 
Territories of Kansas and Nebraska to the enterprise of North 
and South alike, a direct meeting of the antagonistic forces, 
and a direct trial of strength between them upon that ground, 
became inevitable. The collision was eagerly invited by the 
passions of either party. The South, possessed with a wide- 
spread and profound contempt of Northern prowess, was first 
in the field, and while the pulpit and the press of the North 
rang with appeals to the armed rescue of freedom, imperiled 
by slaveholding violence on the plains of Kansas, that Territory 
was invaded by reckless and desperate men from Missouri, and 
its soil stained with the blood of Americans, slain by Ameri- 
cans, in a contest for dominion over the destinies of an imborn 
American State. 

In that supreme moment, if ever, it might have been ex- 
pected that the shadow of the coming doom falling upon the 
minds of the legislators of what was still a Union of States, 
would have impressed upon them the solemnity and the pa- 
tience, the mutual justice and the common patriotism, in which 
alone could any rational hope for the Republic still be found. 

But from the halls of Congress came no oracular voice of 
wisdom and of warning. The clash of arms from the distant 
West went echoing back to the maddened combatants, min- 
gled w^ith clamors of legislative rage, and the sound of blows 
stricken in the very Senate of the nation. 

In 1856, for the first time in the history of the Union, a 
great political party essayed to establish itself in power for the 
express purpose of compelling the slaveholding States to accept 
the condemnation passed upon the institution of slavery by the 
moral sense of modern Christendom. The avowal of this pur- 
pose made it wholly impossible for Southern men to afford the 
slightest sympathy oi' support to the party which avowed it. 
There were many men of worth and character throughout the 



54 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

South who believed slavery to be a thing evil in its nature, and 
in its influenc<3S deadly ; who were far from sharing the bril- 
liant dreams of so many of their fellow-countrymen, as to the 
future of a great slaveholding Republic ; and who ardently 
loved the American Union. The desire of such men as these 
was to see the question of slavery wholly eliminated from all 
political conflicts ; and patriotic statesmanship at the North 
might have so wrought in harmony with them, as long to defer, 
if not finally to defeat, all projects of Southern independence; 
projects which, however flattering to the populations of the 
South Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf, were neither agreeable 
to the predominant opinions nor consonant with the interests 
of the northernmost slaveholding States. 

To gain time in such extremities is a victory of the highest 
importance; and had the candidate who triumphed in the 
election of 1856 been equal to the great opportunity which 
Providence afibrded him the evil day might perhaps have been 
long deferred. But Mr. Buchanan was a politician grown old 
in the small intrigues of party. Neither by nature nor by 
experience was he fitted to hold the even balance of a wise 
authority between the angry sections. His administration 
completed the ruin of the Kepublic. The question of the Ter- 
ritories, indeed, practically settled itself, but the organization 
of the Republican party was immensely strengthened by the 
official corruption and the administrative incapacity which 
reigned at Washington. That the most conspicuous leaders 
of the Republican party, during the revolutionary contest 
which began with the very inauguration of Mr. Buchanan, 
either designed, or, had they anticipated it, would have risked 
the overthrow of the Union, is grossly improbable. Faith in 
the stability of the Union had become an unreasoning instinct 
of the Northern people. The menaces and the warnings of 
the South were regarded with contemptuous incredulity and 
indifference ; and politicians who looked upon the anti-slavery 
passion of the North with the kind of cynical scorn which men 



LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN". 55 

of affairs are apt to feel for all political emotions, did not hesi- 
tate to inflame that passion to the utmost, as an invaluable 
auxiHary in their contest for power. 

The anti-slavery word was propagated far and wide through- 
out the land; and tlie force with which it had possessed the 
popular heart of the ISTorth was revealed in proportions which, 
to use an image of Jefferson, could not fail to rouse the people 
of the South " like a fire-bell in the night," when in the autumn 
of 1859, John Brown, a fanatical enthusiast, who had "done 
the Lord's work not negligently" in Kansas, attempted to set 
up the standard of revolt against slavery within the borders 
of the State of Virginia. 

At the North this wild and visionary act was regarded by 
no inconsiderable part of the population as an inspiration of 
divine rage against a devilish wrong. The bearing of Brown, 
during the scenes which preceded his execution, was such as 
to command for him the almost idolatrous admiration of those 
who had gradually come to believe the abolition of slavery, at 
whatever cost, the immediate and paramount duty of all 
Americans worthy of the name. By the great majority of the 
Korthern people, indeed, his conduct was condemned, but it 
was condemned in a vague, languid way, as by men who were 
too much occupied in their own affairs, and too wholly confi- 
dent of the future to waste their thoughts or their feelings 
upon a mere " sensational" incident of the passing day. At 
the South, of course, the case was widely different. Quiet and 
conservative men were there startled into an indignation and 
alarm of which the extreme revolutionary party of the South 
availed themselves as earnestly and as adroitly as the politi- 
cians of the Republican party at the North turned to their 
own uses the exciting event itself. 

For many years, the organization of the militia throughout 
the United States had been falling into decay. Military schools 
of a respectable character existed, indeed, in several of the 
Southern States, and in many of the Southern cities indepen- 



56 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

dent companies of A^olunteers were to be found, adequately 
equipped, and not inadequately trained to such service as vol- 
unteers might commonly expect to be called upon to render. 
But the habits of the Southern people and the distribution of 
population in the South were alike unfavorable to any general 
military organization. At the !N^orth, matters were in a some- 
what better state. In Massachusetts especially, thanks to the 
somewhat ostentatious administration of Governor Banks, and 
in New York, at the time of the " John Brown raid," many 
regiments of militia were to be found not wholly unaccustomed 
to regimental action ; while there is reason to believe that not 
more than one or two such regiments then existed in the whole 
extent of the South. Steps were immediately taken to im- 
prove the military organization of the Southern people in their 
several districts. Col. Jefferson Davis, then a senator of the 
United States from Mississippi, who had won distinction in the 
field during the Mexican war, and had acquired experience in 
military administration as secretary of war in the cabinet of 
President Pierce ; Henry A. Wise, then governor of Virginia, 
a man almost insanely impetuous in temperament, but ingenious 
and indefatigable in the pursuit of his objects ; and John B. 
Floyd, secretary of war in the cabinet of President Buchanan, 
an ardent and unscrupulous partisan of "Southern indepen- 
dence," devoted themselves with a particular zeal to this work. 
It was impossible that the measures necessary to success in 
such an effort should not heighten the animosity of the Southern 
people against the people of the N'orth. The identification of 
the ideas of abohtionism and of the North had for several 
years been complete in the minds of the common people of the 
slaveholding States. A further step was now taken, and the 
" minute men " of the Southern States rapidly came to consider 
themselves the sentinels and body-guard of Southern society 
against the threatened invasions of a fanatical North. Upon 
this irritated and dangerous condition of the body politic the 
presidential election of 1860 supei-vened. 



I 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 57 

Four candidates were eventually presented to the people for 
their suffrages, by means of that new system of national con- 
ventions for nomination which had gradually established itself 
as a part of the political machinery of the American govern- 
ment. One of these candidates, Mr. Lincoln, was a politician 
of Illinois of no large national experience, who had adroitly 
advanced himself, and had still more adroitly suffered himself 
to be advanced into the front rank of the heterogeneous sec- 
tional party of which he was suddenly made the champion and 
representative. With a facility of habits and tastes, and an 
apparent simplicity of character, which commended him to the 
sympathy of the lower orders of his countrymen, he united a 
mystical fanaticism of temperament which commanded for him 
the confidence of those who aimed at a moral and political 
revolution in America, and a practised cunning which enabled 
him to extract from his double character of politician and of 
reformer the utmost possible advantage without committing 
himself absolutely to either. 

The most formidable opponent of Mr. Lincoln was Mr. 
Douglas, also of Illinois, of whom mention has before been 
made. Mr. Douglas occupied a singular and trying position. 
He had incurred the personal animosity of President Buchanan, 
who exerted the whole force of his official influence to prevent 
the nomination of Mr. Douglas by the Democratic party. The 
ground taken by Mr. Douglas on the question of slavery was 
almost equally odious to the extreme representatives of South- 
ern and of Northern passion. To himself the institution of 
slavery was morally indifferent, and this fact impaired his in- 
fluence at the North with men who, while they condemned 
political abolitionism as being at once impolitic and unjust, 
were keenly alive to the shame and anomaly of the vigorous 
existence of slavery in the American Republic. At the South, 
while Mr. Douglas was detested by those who aspired after 
Southern independence, and disliked by the much larger body 
of those who desired to see the slave property of the South 



58 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE E. McCLELLAN. 

positively protected by the Federal authority beyond the limits 
of the States, he was popular with the numbers who cared 
more for the Union than for slavery, who regarded abolition- 
ism as a sort of malignant invention which might and ought 
to be put down, and who shrank from the disruption of the 
confederacy either in a blind horror of all great political 
changes, or from a wise prescience of the calamities which 
must follow in its train. In the hope of propitiating the South, 
and harmonizing its own distracted elements, the Democratic 
party had appointed its Convention to be held at Charleston, 
in South Carolina. The Convention accordingly met in that 
city, April 23d, 1860. After a session of three weeks, the 
Convention adjourned in disorder, to meet in Baltimore, June 
18th; the delegates of all the "Cotton States" having with- 
drawn from the body, nominally upon the refusal of the Con- 
vention to adopt the " platform " proposed by them, but 
really upon a question of candidates, the friends of Mr. Doug- 
las insisting, in the face of his own remonstrances,* that he 
should be nominated, with some moderate Southern man, like 
Mr. Orr, of South Carolina, Mr. Fitzpatrick, of Alabama, or 
Mr. Johnson, of Georgia, as the vice-presidential candidate 
upon the same ticket. 

When the Convention met again in Baltimore the temper of 
the members was found to be more uncompromising, and their 
differences were found to be more irreconcilable than before. 
The Border slave States, which had refused to leave the Con- 
vention at Charleston, abandoned it at Baltimore, Missouri 
alone declining so to do, and coalescing with the States of the 

* There can be no doubt that the consent of Mr. Douglas to appear 
as a candidate was wrung from him by liis friends. Had lie been cer- 
tain of election, his ambition must have made him prefer the immense 
power he would have wielded for four years, as the Democratic leader 
of the Senate, -under a Democratic President, with the assurance of the 
" succession," at the end of that time ; to four years of executive au- 
thority, accepted under circumstances peculiarly embarrassing, and 
leaving him, when they were fulfilled, a man still in the prime of life, 
but practically " shelved." 



LIFE OF GBN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 59 

Gulf, conferred a presidential nomination upon Mr. Breckin- 
ridge, then vice-president of the Union ; a man amiable and 
well-disposed, but infirm of will, and in politics vacillating, 
whose nomination, in the circumstances, was a simple offer to 
the North of the grand alternative of " Southern Rights " or 
secession. 

The original Convention nominated Mr. Douglas, with Mr. 
Fitzpatrick of Alabama. The latter gentleman, after promis- 
ing acceptance, gave way to private representations and de- 
chned the proffered honor, which was finally assumed by Mr. 
Johnson of Georgia. 

Mr. Bell of Tennessee, a respectable politician of the school 
of Clay, was also made a presidential candidate, with Mr. 
Everett of Massachusetts as vice-president, by a " Constitu- 
tional Union party." These latter nominations were simply a 
cry of conservative despair. 

In November, 1860, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, was chosen 
president of the United States by an overwhelming majority 
of the electoral vote of the States. He received, however, a 
marked minority of the total popular vote of the Union, and 
his leading competitor, Mr. Douglas, fell but a little way be- 
hind him in the popular vote of the North itself. 

This event was almost immediately followed by the formal 
secession from the Union of the State of South Carolina. 
Whether this secession, which took place Dec. 24th, 1860, 
was intended by all who assisted in bringing it about to be 
final ; or whether a large number of influential men, even in 
South Carolina, hoped by this decisive act to compel a recon- 
sideration of the past in American politics, and the eventual 
reconstruction of the Union upon principles more favorable to 
the peace of the slaveholding States, is a question certainly 
open to discussion, but not here to be discussed. 

The majority of the people of South Carolina itself undoubt- 
edly belieyed that a complete separation, political and fiscal, 
from the other States of the Union, as well Southern as North- 



60 LIFE OF G:EN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

ern, would serve their local interests as mucli as it gratified 
their local passions. That the power of the Federal govern- 
ment would ever be employed to coerce them into accepting 
the authority of the newly chosen national executive, or that 
if so employed it could achieve such a result, few of them be- . 
lieved. In anticipation of the possibility of such an event, 
h6wever, the State of South Carolina at once began military 
preparations, mainly for the defense of the harbor of Charles- 
ton, but these preparations were neither extensive nor for- 
midable. 

Immediately upon the passage of the ordinance of secession, 
the news of which was received at the North, at first with 
incredulity, and^fterwards with derision, commissioners were 
appointed to visit the city of Washington and open negotiations 
with the Federal government for a peaceable separation. These 
commissioners, three in number, after being indirectly encour- 
aged by President Buchanan to believe that informal commu- 
nication would be held with them, addressed a letter to that 
functionary, January 3d, 1861, which was returned to them 
within three hours after it had been received, with an indorse- 
ment declaring that the president could not read or consider 
such a document. Upon this the commissioners, one at least 
of whom, Mr. Orr, there is reason to believe was honestly anx- 
ious for such an amicable arrangement of the terms of secession 
as might not wholly close the door against any subsequent re- 
vision of the whole matter, instantly returned to South Caro- 
lina. On their way home they passed through Richmond, 
where their account of the condition of affairs at once exhila- 
rated the then small party of secession in Virginia, and alarmed 
the much larger party in that State of those who hoped that 
Virginia in virtue of her traditional influence and her actual 
importance might be enabled to control the rising tide of 
events, and avert the now impending peril of civil war. 

Jt would be beside our present purpose to recite at length 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 61 

and in detail the incidents which from this moment forward 
hurried on the action of the fatal drama. 

One after another the States of Georgia, Alabama, Florida, 
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, were swept into the pathway 
opened by South Carohna. 

The sectional passion, of which we have sketched the origin 
and development, was unquestionably the impelling force of 
this formidable movement. But the resistance which it must 
otherwise have encountered was paralyzed by the conviction 
of numbers of honest and patriotic men in those States, that 
nothing less than a unanimous array of Southern strength, not 
so much in support of the attitude of South Carolina, as in as- 
sertion of her right to be unmolested in assuming that attitude, 
could prevent the Federal government from drawing the sw^ord 
and committing the whole issue irrevocably to that dread ar- 
bitrament. That the people of South Carolina in the heat of 
their new-born independence were determined to accept this 
arbitrament, if forced upon them, w^as shown in the month of 
January, when the flag of the United States, flying from a 
steamer commissioned to relieve tlie Federal garrison in 
Charleston harbor, was fired upon by the shore batteries of the 
State, and the vessel herself compelled to return without fulfill- 
ing her errand. Upon 'this Mr. Thompson of Mississippi re- 
signed his seat in the cabinet of Mr. Buchanan, declaring that 
the attempt to provision Fort Sumter was a breach of faith 
with South Carolina, and a violation of the president's under- 
standing with his own advisers. 

The people of the North, astounded by the turn which 
events were taking, accepted the apathy of the administration 
as a policy, in the absence of any authority able and willing to 
initiate a more decisive turn in afiTairs. A deep feeling of indig- 
nation against the seceded States began, however, to move the 
Northern heart. It is as true of nations as of men, that those 
who find themselves overtaken by a catastrophe which they 
ought themselves to have foreseen and averted are always par- 



62 LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 

ticularly impatient and unjust towards the immediate authors 
of the mischief. The explosion which had now shaken asunder 
the arch of the Union began to be charged to the account of a 
few conspirators bent on self-aggrandizement at the expense 
of their country. A terrible misfortune, more directly attrib- 
utable to the want of statesmanship and character in the na- 
tional councils than to any other single cause, gradually assumed 
the aspect of an atrocious crime, to be remorselessly chastised. 
Those among the leaders of the incoming administration whose 
experience and whose capacity might have enabled them to 
impose upon their associates and upon the country a larger, 
and calmer, and wiser view of the position, were, unhappily, 
swayed by the delusion that as the whole matter had been in 
a great measure brought about by the manoeuvres of politicians, 
it might be safely treated as a gigantic but ephemeral demon- 
stration, to be met by counter-demonstrations as gigantic knd 
as ephemeral. 

By the force of this delusion all the good which perhaps 
might also have followed from the convocation at Washington, 
early in February, of the " National Peace Congress," was 
defeated. The deliberations of this " Congress" were presided 
over by an ex-president of the Union, John Tyler, of Virginia, 
and many men of mark took part in it? deliberations. But the 
actual leaders of the hour at the Korth looked upon this Con- 
gress with mingled disgust and contempt. They regarded it 
as a device to secure, in the words of Secretary Chase, " the 
absolute submission and humiliation of the non-slaveholders of 
the country," and all hope of any practical result from its con- 
ferences was dashed by the ingenuity of a member from New 
York, entirely devoted to the passions and the purposes of 
those who believed, with a senator from Michigan, that " a 
little blood-letting" would do the country no harm. 

The impression that the whole movement of secession might 
be safely dealt with as an ebullition of local petulance, in- 
flamed by partisan passion, was greatly strengthened at the 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 63 

North by the faihire of the "unconditional secessionists " to 
secure a majority in the Virginia Convention, elected on the 
4th of February, and by the refusal of the people of Tennes- 
see and North Carolina to go into convention at all, and these 
facts, which ought to have fortified the party of conciliation 
at the North, were perverted to the service of this fatal im- 
pression. 

There was, however, it must be said, not a little in the 
course and conduct of many of the seceding leaders them- 
selves to foster this delusion. The seceding States sent dele- 
gates in February to a provisional Congress at Montgomery, 
in Alabama. Here a Constitution substantially modelled upon 
that of 178Y, was provisionally adopted, and a provisional gov- 
ernment chosen for the federal administration of the seceding 
States, under the style and title of the " Confederate States of 
America." Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, was named provi- 
sional president, and Alexander H. Stephens, of Georgia, pro- 
visional vice-president of this new confederacy. The cabinet 
of Mr. Davis was at once made up of men by no means iden- 
tified with the party of secession at the South. The most 
conspicuous advocates of " Southern Independence," indeed, 
were treated by their new president with a coldness and a re- 
fusal of confidence, which provoked an immediate and vehe- 
ment outburst of disgust and indignation from their organs in 
the Southern press. Further to the North, the efibrts of the 
secessionists of the border States to impel those powerful com- 
munities into following the course of their "Southern sisters," 
were sternly resisted by a majority of the population, and se- 
cretly impeded by the representatives of the " government" at 
Montgomery. While that government proceeded at once to 
take measures for raising a " provisional army" of one hundred 
thousand men, it did not desire, nor did it really expect to be 
forced into the field against the government of the Union. 
Extravagantly confident in the power of the cotton interest to 
compel an immediate recognition of the Confederacy by the 



64 " LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 

greater European States, the Confederate authorities hoped to 
see the border States cling to the Union, at least long enough 
to impose a policy of forbearance and compromise upon the 
incoming administration of Mr. Lincoln. To this end, infor- 
mal negotiations were carried on during the critical month of 
February, and the first part of the m't)nth of March, between 
certain leaders of the incoming Federal administration on the 
one side, and the conservative leaders of Virginia, which State 
believed herself to he the arbiter of the situation, on the other. 
The most delicate and perilous feature of the situation at 
this time, was the occupation by the United States' troops, 
under Major Anderson, of Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor. 
Down to the day of the secession of South Carolina, Fort 
Sumter had been practically unoccupied ; the Federal garrison 
holding Fort Moultrie, a more interior defence of the harbor. 
It had been understood between the government of the Union 
and that of South Carolina, that no change should occur in the 
military situation at Charlesto-n. This, at least, was claimed 
by Mr. Floyd, secretary of war under President Buchanan. 
During the night of the 20th of December, however, Major 
Anderson silently transferred his garrison from Fort Moultrie 
to Fort Sumter, having previously taken such hasty measures 
as the time and the circumstances permitted for dismantling 
the former stronghold. This act was regarded by the South 
Carolinians as an act of war, and they immediately proceeded 
to occupy the deserted fortress, at the same time declaring 
that they were willing to treat for the evacuation of Fort 
Sumter ; that, pending the result of negotiations upon this 
subject, they would suffer the post to be supplied from Charles- 
ton, — but that any attempt on the part of the Federal govern- 
ment to throw into it either men or provisions, would be re- 
sisted by them at all risks. It was in pursuance of this de- 
claration that the steamer " Star of the West," as we have al- 
ready stated, was fired upon by the South Carolinian batteries, 
on the 9th of January. President Buchanan having failed to 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 65 

take, and the people of the Union having failed to demand that 
he should take, any steps in response to the challenge thus 
thrown down to the government, the question of Fort Sum- 
ter met the administration of , President Lincoln at the thres- 
hold. 

As making an issue between the seceding States and the 
Federal government upon the right of the former to the pos- 
session of the Federal fortresses and property within the limits 
of their territory, this was by no means an isolated question. 
Nor did it offer that issue in the most offensive form, or in the 
circumstances most galling to the self-respect of the Federal 
authorities. Between the 20th of December, 1860, and the 
20th of February, 1861, many forts and arsenals of the United 
States had been seized in the States of South Carolina, Geor- 
gia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. In 
several cases, the garrisons of these forts and arsenals had 
been compelled to surrender, and to lower the flag of the 
Union before a superior force. In the State of Texas, a gen- 
eral of the Federal army, Twiggs, had taken advantage of his 
position to put the troops and the property confided to his 
charge at the mercy of the State authorities. 

It is not at all probable that, in transferring his small garri- 
son from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter, Major Anderson had 
any intelligent apprehension of the consequences which were 
to flow from his action. He seems to have been moved by a 
sort of blind instinct, such as in many other supreme crises of 
history, has determined steps in themselves apparently insig- 
nificant, but destined, in the great chain of causes and effects, 
to decide the direction of changes infinitely momentous. 

As February wore away, it became apparent to all thought- 
ful observers that the immediate issues of peace and war lay 
involved in the settlement of this question of. Fort Sumter. 
The people of the Union were entirely uncommitted upon the 
matter, and awaited in a kind of incredulous amazement the 
signal of some decisive action by the government. The presi- 



66 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

dent elect preserved an obstinate and absolute silence upon the 
point, veiling his views and his intentions under a studied dis- 
play of levity and unconcern, which contrasted strangely 
enough with the hot and' positive breathings of Southern pas- 
sion. Some of those who believed themselves, or affected to 
believe themselves, the future masters of the presidential poli- 
cy, threw out, however, intimations as positive as intimations 
can ever be said to be, that no issue of force would be made 
upon the occupation or evacuation of the South Carolinian 
fortress. Down to the day of the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln, 
March 4th, 1861, these intimations were authoritatively, though 
unofficially, conveyed to the "Union" men of Virginia, by 
whom they were effectively used in thwarting the projects and 
disarming the appeals of those who were bent upon driving 
that great commonwealth into an act of secession. 

The extreme men of the South, many of whom still remained 
at Washington, labored incessantly, both there and at Mont- 
gomery, to discredit these intimations ; to commit not only 
Virginia, but Kentucky, Tennessee, l^orth Carolina, and Mary- 
land to the new Confederacy, before the administration of Mr. 
Lincoln should be established in power ; and to precipitate an 
attack on Fort Sumter. These men, of whom Senator Wig- 
fall, of Texas, was a leader and a type, had,- with difficulty, 
been restrained during the early winter from organizing and 
executing plots for the seizure of Washington and Baltimore ; 
for the occupation of Korfolk and Fortress Monroe, both of 
which important points might easily have been mastered by 
small bodies of desperate and determined men ; and for the 
abduction of General Scott, who, with the able and efficient 
co-operation of Colonel, since Brigadier-General Charles P. 
Stone, of Massachusetts, an accomplished officer, called by him 
from the civil life to which he had retired, had taken such 
measures, during the month of February, for the protection 
of the Federal capital against their enterprises, as must have 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 67 

insured their utter failure, had they ever been seriously at- 
tempted. 

The more temperate leaders, into whose control the direc- 
tion of the Southern movement had fallen, shrank from forcing 
the crisis of the great events which had lifted them into a po- 
sition at once of so much power and of so much peril. They 
clung to the hope of peace, believing that, if the disruption of 
the Union could be accomplished without a resort to arms, an 
immense revulsion would set in of the popular feeling in the 
Korth and West, which wt)uld compel the resignation of Mr. 
Lincoln, and bring about a convention of all the States for the 
purpose of reconsidering the past, and reorganizing the na- 
tional government upon a new and more permanent basis, 
adapted to the profound changes which had taken place in the 
condition of all sections of the country. 

On the 4th of March, 1861, Mr. Lincoln took the oath of 
office as President of the United States. For the first time in 
the history of the Republic, its chief magistrate passed along 
the streets of Washington to the Capitol under an escort of 
armed men. Cannon commanded the approaches to the city ; 
a cloud of cavalry encircled the presidential equipage, and the 
elect of the nation entered the Senate House between files of 
the sappers and miners, the corps d'elite of the small Federal 
army. The Inaugural Address of'the president had been com- 
municated to those who were to appear in history as his con- 
fidential advisers only a few hours before it was actually de- 
livered ; and, while the burden of the discourse seemed to be 
eminently in harmony with the professions of forbearance and 
conciliation which had been so abundantly put forth by the 
most conspicuous of those advisers, the single assertion which 
it contained on the point of the president's future policy plain- 
ly revealed, to those who had ears to hear, his deep and settled 
determination to drive the South from the position which it 
had sought to assume. The president declared it to be his in- 
tention to " hold, occupy, and possess the forts and places be- 



68 'LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

longing to the government." By this declaration, the govern- 
ment of the Union was brought face to face with the govern- 
ments of the^ seceded States and of the newly formed Confed- 
eracy, which were already in possession of many " forts and 
places belonging" to the former government, and which main- 
tained their right, as representing the people of the seceded 
South, to the possession of all such " forts and places" within 
the limits over which their authority was claimed to extend. 

The Confederate government, at Montgomery, at once dis- 
patched commissioners to Washington for the purpose of open- 
ing negotiations upon this point, and upon all other points 
arising, or to arise, between the people of the " Union" and 
the people of the " Confederacy." Mr. Seward, secretary of 
state, put himself into communication with these commission- 
ers through Judge Campbell, of the Supreme Court of the 
United States, by whom it is asserted that he was made the 
instrument of equivocations and false dealing with them, for 
the purpose of gaining so much time as might be necessary 
for completing the preparations which the government of Mr. 
Lincoln was meanwhile making to execute the declared inten- 
tion of the president. It is quite as probable, however, that 
the president had taken exclusively upon himself the responsi- 
bility of opening his own policy without making that fact 
known to the secretary of state ; that he abstained entirely 
from committing himself to any part in the action taken by 
this minister, and that he began his official career by ordering 
the reinforcement of Fort Sumter within a few hours of his 
formal installation in the presidential chair. Whatever confi- 
dence may have been felt by Mr. Davis and his cabinet in the 
representations which were made to them from Washington 
of the intended evacuation of Fort Sumter, and of the pacific 
dispositions of the Federal administration, no efforts were 
spared by them to prepare for the worst. The organization 
of the Confederate army was pushed forward as rapidly as the 
mutual jealousies and the extravagant pretensions of the differ- 



1 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 69 

ent seceded States would permit. Neither arms nor munitions 
of war were lacking in the Southern States, and the resigna- 
tion, by a considerable number of officers of Southern birth, of 
their commissions in the Federal army, enabled the Confeder- 
ate government, and the governments of the seceded States, to 
provide the volunteers, who pressed forward into their service, 
with a reasonably efficient staff of leaders. 

One of the most prominent of these officers. Major Pierre 
Toutant Beauregard, of Louisiana, a man still in the flower of 
his years, who had distinguished himself as an engineer and 
in action during the Mexican war, had been sent, immediately 
after the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln, with the rank of gen- 
eral, to superintend the fortifications, offensive and defensive, 
of Charleston harbor. General Beauregard found the enthu- 
siastic volunteers of South Carolina ardently engaged in pre- 
paring for themselves the certainty of a speedy doom so soon 
as the Federal fire should open from Fort Sumter upon their 
inaccurate and inadequate works. Under his practised and 
skillful supervision the aspect of affairs rapidly underwent a 
radical change; and when, in the beginning of April, the pre- 
parations of the Federal government for the reinforcement of 
Fort Sumter were completed, and the fleet which bore with it 
the fate of the Republic steamed out from the port of New 
York, the issue of any serious attempt to relieve the belea- 
guered fortress was no longer doubtful. 

It is charged by the South Carolinian authorities that an 
unfair and dishonorable use was made of the permission to 
visit Fort Sumter which was accorded by them to an agent of 
the Federal government on the 6th of April, and that this 
agent communicated to Major Anderson the plan which had 
been devised at Washington for reinforcing him. Be this as 
it may, the squadron detailed for the relief of Fort Sumter ap- 
peared off Charleston harbor on the 8th of April ; and on the 
same day the government at Montgomery was startled into 
comprehending the intentions of President Lincoln by a tele- 



70 LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 

graphic message from General Beam*egard, announcing that 
he had received notice of the determination of the Federal au- 
thorities to send provisions to Fort Sumter, " peaceably, if 
they could ; forcibly, if they must." 

Upon this the secretary of war of the Confederates, Mr. 
Walker of Alabama, a hasty and hot-headed man, powerful by 
his family connections, but himself of little weight or influence, 
telegraphed to General Beauregard an order instructing him to 
demand the evacuation of Fort Sumter, and should the sum- 
mons be disregarded to open fire upon it at once. The de- 
mand was made accordingly, and Major Anderson in a quiet 
and spirited reply refused to comply with it. 

The issue had at last been made and met. Those who made 
it were far from believing that it would be thus promptly and 
peremptorily met. , Those who met it had but a dim and vague^ 
conception of the gigantic consequences involved in the action 
they were now about to take. In the Northern cities the vast 
majority of the population laughed to scorn the notion that a 
fleet of the Union, advancing to the relief of a fortress of the 
Union, would really be attacked by the batteries of the South 
Carolinians, the " Gascons " of America, as from their persist- 
ent and petulant boastings they had long since come to be con- 
sidered. In Charleston, on the contrary, the electric anticipa- 
tion of battle thrilled the popular heart with a kind of Ber- 
serk madness. The accumulated passion and contempt of 
years blazed out in an ecstasy of fierce rapture at the prospect 
of an actual collision with the despised and detested " Yan- 
kees " of the North. 

On the 12th of April, in the gray of the early morning, the 
boom of the cannon broke upon the lightly slumbering city. 
Half the night through the men and the women of Charleston 
had listened for that sound — the few in sadness, soberness, and 
solemnity of heart ; the many with an almost delirious im- 
patience. 

As gun after gun rang out upon the still spring air the 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. Yl 

people hurried from all quarters of the city to the points of 
view which best commanded the strange and exciting spec- 
tacle. All day long the conflict was kept up between the for- 
tress and the batteries, the squadron of relief, meanwhile, 
steaming idly to and fro off the bar. 

The batteries of General Beauregard had been skillfully con- 
structed, and their guns were served with precision, but the 
fortress still held out when night fell upon the scene. The 
attack was renewed the next morning ; by noon the fortress 
was in a blaze, and in the afternoon of Saturday, April 13th, 
the news of the surrender of Fort Sumter to the Confederate 
forces was telegraphed throug|iout the Union. 

At the North this news was received at first with blank in- 
credulity ; and when it had become no longer possible to doubt, 
men stared one upon, the other " with a wild surmise," as ig- 
norant and unresolved what next to expect, or to suggest, or 
even to wish. 

At the South the tidings everywhere set on fire the inflam- 
mable temper of the already excited population. In all the 
leading towns and cities of the South, the bells were rung in 
peals of joy ; bonfires reddened the sky, and the standards of 
the new Confederacy and of the States were raised by exulting 
crowds. 

The astonishing fact that throughout the two days of con- 
flict between the fortress and the batteries no human life had 
been lost was hailed as a merciful interposition of Providence, 
lending thus to the new-born Republic the consecration of a 
bloodless parting from its old associates. 

The amazement of the North, and the jubilation of the South, 
were of brief duration. On Sunday, April 14th, President Lin- 
coln issued a proclamation, declaring that the execution of the 
laws of the United States were obstructed in the States of 
South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Lou- 
isiana, and Texas, by " combinations too powerful to "be sup- 
pressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceeding, or by the 



72 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. MoCLELLAI?'. 

powers vested in the marshals by law," and calling upon the 
States of the Union to furnish their militia to the aggregate 
number of seventy-five thousand men, for the purpose of sup- 
pressing these combinations. This proclamation was modelled 
upon a proclamation issued by Washington in 1792, and there 
can be no doubt, either that the execution of the laws of the 
United States was really obstructed in the States mentioned, 
or that the president was legally clothed with power to call 
out the militia of the States for the purpose of enforcing such 
execution. An interesting controversy might well be main- 
tained, however, as to whether it was intended by the framers 
of the Constitution that, in circumstances such as had now 
arisen, or in any circumstances, the president should possess 
the right to march the militia of one State into another for 
this purpose, without an express demand made upon him to 
that effect by the government of the invaded State. 

In times of revolutionary excitement, however, acts are 
arguments. The people of the North rallied at the call of the 
I^ational Executive, the more enthusiastically that neither the 
Executive nor the people at all comprehended the true pro- 
portions of the events which had provoked it. !N"ever before, 
in the history of the new world, had so vast a force been so 
suddenly summoned under arms. The battles of America had 
been fought, fi'om the wars of King Phihp to the conquest of 
Mexico, by armies the greatest of which scarcely outnumbered 
a strong European division. To the popular imagination a 
host of seventy -five thousand men presented an image of irre- 
sistible strength. 

Thousands of Northern citizens who would have shrunk 
back in horror and dread from the anticipation of a civil war, 
and who firmly believed the movement of secession to be a 
tumult evoked by ambitious demagogues, and odious even to 
the masses of those who were for the moment swept onward 
in its rush, hailed the proclamation of the president as open- 
ing the prospect of a speedy and pacific settlement of the 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 73 

difficulty. The army which he had called into the field was 
regarded as a magnificent demonstration of the national po- 
lice, by the sheer moral weight of which the illegal combina- 
tions dominant in the seceded States must be immediately 
broken up and dispersed. It was fully believed, too, at the 
North, that the States of the South which had, down to this 
time, resisted the impulse of secession, would contribute their 
quotas to this demonstration ; and while the comparatively 
small party of those who at the North had gradually learned 
to hate the Southern people in hating Southern institutions, 
rejoiced in the hope of taming the Carolinian pride, and curb- 
ing the recklessness of the great Southwestern States, the 
nursing-mothers of " fillibustering " and lawless foreign adven- 
ture, the conservative majorities of the North, animated by a 
passionate and unreasoning devotion to the idea of American 
unity, burned with a less unfraternal zeal to chastise the un- 
scrupulous enemies and to reinforce the overawed disciples of 
that idea in the South. 

But the foresight which thirty years before had so earnest- 
ly deprecated the perils of any attempt to impose the nation- 
<^1 will by force of arms upon States acting in their sovereign 
capacity, was abundantly justified by the eflects of the proc- 
lamation of April 14th throughout the entire body of the 
Southern commonwealths. 

The governors of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Mis- 
souri, Arkansas, and Tennessee, responded to the appeal of 
the President by refusing, in language ranging from the 
courtesy of remonstrance to the contempt of flat denuncia- 
tion and defiance, to furnish the government with troops for 
the purpose of aiding in what Governor Ellis, of North Caro- 
lina, styled a " wicked violation of the laws of the country," 
and Governor Jackson, of Missouri, an " inhuman and dia- 
bolical " project. 

Maryland alone proffered, by her governor, the quota asked 
of her by the President ; but in a published proclamation the 



74 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAl?^. 

governor of that State also invited the people to elect for 
themselves between the United and the Confederate States. 

On the I7th day of April, 1861, the proudest and most il- 
lustrious of the American States, the great commonwealth of 
Virginia, withdrew from the Union which Virginians had been 
foremost in founding, and over whose history a long line of 
conspicuous Virginians — statesmen, soldiers, and jurists — had 
shed the light of their patriotism and their genius. It might 
have been expected that an act so solemn and so sad would 
be accomplished by the actors with solemnity and sadness, and 
that it would have imposed, at least, a brief moment of awe 
upon all sections of the great people whose destinies it was, 
for good or ill, so tremendously to affect. 

But the tragic proprieties of history exist mainly in the im- 
agination of historians. The secession of South Carolina had 
been prepared with a deliberate eye to dramatic effect, and 
had been put upon the stage with all the pomp and circum- 
stance within the resources of the State. The ordinance of 
secession of Virginia was hurried through an excited and agi- 
tated convention, amid the shouts of a noisy and uproarious 
populace. During the few days which immediately precede^ 
the passage of this ordinance, Kichmond had been subjected 
to a reign of terror. The governor of the Commonwealth, 
and a majority of the members of the Convention, were 
known to be hostile to the measure, but not a few of the 
more conspicuous among these friends of the Union were men 
whose want of personal character and moral courage infected 
the whole party to which they belonged with vacillation and 
timidity. The more respectable among them, too, had laid 
such stress upon the representations made to themselves, by 
friends of the administration at Washington, concerning the 
policy of forbearance about to be pursued by Mr. Lincoln, 
that the sudden contradiction given by events to all their as- 
surances paralyzed at once their spirit and their influence. 
Those who had accepted office from Mr. Lincoln, in Rich- 



LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 75 

mend, were hastily driven into resigning their posts. Men of 
Northern birth were insulted by vagrant deputations from ir- 
responsible vigilance committees ; and throughout the State a 
strange spasm of lawlessness and violence accompanied the 
resumption by the " Old Dominion" of that complete " inde- 
pendence" which Virginia, of all the American common- 
wealths, should have been the most careful to assert, if assert 
it she must, with decency, with dignity, and with composure. 
In truth, a certain dim consciousness of the peril which they 
were incurring now began to mingle with the passion of the 
Virginian secessionists. No adequate preparations had been 
made in Virginia for the contingency which had now over- 
taken her. Neither Harper's Ferry, the great arsenal of the 
nation, nor Norfolk, one of its chief naval stations, nor For- 
tress Monroe, commanding the waters of the Chesapeake and 
the James River, all of which were within her territory, had 
she taken any measures to secure. While the more extreme 
States of the South had been denouncing Virginia as indiffer- 
ent, if not false, to the Southern cause, the secessionists of 
Virginia had been too much occupied in bringing the popular 
feeling up to the work which they had planned, to find much 
time for providing the materials necessary to the success of 
that work when once begun. Before they could throw the 
force of the State into an active disposable form, Harper's 
Ferry had been evacuated and partially destroyed by the Fed- 
eral commander of the post ; Norfolk had been evacuated, and 
a vast quantity of the stores there accumulated, with several 
men-of-war, had been consigned to the flames ; and Federal 
reinforcements had been thrown into Fortress Monroe. 

Without committing herself at once to the Confederacy of 
the South, Virginia rapidly threw herself upon the defensive. 
Colonel Robert E. Lee, a soldier of marked ability and expe- 
rience, although avowedly and sorrowfully averse from the 
policy of South Carolina and the extreme secessionists, felt 
himself constrained by the withdrawal of Virginia from the 



76 LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

Union to resign his commission in the Federal army, and to 
take service with his native State. He declined to receive a 
commission from the government at Montgomery, and was 
appointed by the governor of Virginia to the chief command 
of the " Virginia forces." 

Meanwhile the republican jom-nals of the North rang with 
ridicule of the anile and impotent commonwealth which had 
assumed to clothe secession with the faded terrors of her 
countenance. It was satisfactorily shown by the returns of 
the census that the " Mother of States and of Presidents " 
was decidedly in her dotage, that her financial condition was 
hopelessly involved, and her military strength contemptible. 
The vision of a victorious invasion, sweeping over the graves 
of Washington, of Jefferson, of Henry, and of Madison, to 
plant again the banner of the Union above the humbled stand- 
ard of Virginia, was contemplated, not as men contemplate a 
stern and painful necessity, but with a certain riotous and ex- 
uberant levity, the sole and poor excuse of which is to be 
sought in the unhappy inability of the people fully to compre- 
hend the realities upon which they were rushing. 

By the secession of Virginia, the slaveholding States of the 
West and the State of North Carolina may be said to have 
been taken in the flank and rear. If that secession was to be 
maintained in arms against an assault in arms, it was clearly 
impossible that North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkan- 
sas and Missouri could hope to escape from the necessity of 
acting with one or the other of the contending parties. The 
position of Maryland excepted that State from this double 
pressure, at once political and military, while it exposed her to 
analogous pressure from the power of the North and West. 
Although the institution of slavery had long been decaying in 
Maryland, the habits and feelings of the people were still 
deeply tinged with its influences, and by a thousand ties of 
association, tradition, and political opinion, the most influential 
classes of Maryland were inclined to sympathize with the 



LIFE OF GEN". GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 77 

States beyond the Potomac. A powerful party existed in 
Maryland bent upon effecting the secession of the State. This 
party was particularly strong in the city of Baltimore ; and 
there is reason to believe that upon the strength of promises 
of assistance in the way of men and of arms, made to them by 
the eager and headlong secessionists of Virginia, the leaders 
of this party had made no inconsiderable progress towards 
preparing a revolutionary movement in Baltimore, when all 
their j)lans were disconcerted, and all their hopes dashed to 
the ground, by the discovery that Virginia, once in secession, 
had neither men nor arms to spare. Simultaneously with this 
discovery, events occurred in Baltimore which at once pre- 
cipitated tile full power of the Federal government upon that 
city, and fixed it as in a vice. 

On the 19th of April, a regiment of volunteers from Massa- 
chusetts, passing through Baltimore, on their way to the de- 
fence of the national capital, were compelled to leave the train 
in which they were travelling, by a barricade of stones and 
rubbish hastily thrown up on the track, and to march through 
the streets of the city. Their appearance was the signal for a 
popular demonstration. An angry crowd, chiefly made up or 
the dregs of the Baltimore populace, thronged about them with 
taunts and cries, waving the flag of the Confederates, and as- 
sailing their columns with missiles of all descriptions. The 
march soon became a tneUe^ and when the troops finally 
reached the station at which they were to reembark for Wash- 
ington, a desperate attempt was made to block up the track 
and convert the melee into a massacre. The troops, however, 
finally moved off, firing from the windows of the cars, and 
killing, by one of their last volleys, a gentlemsdn who had 
taken no part in the riot save as a spectator. Other citizens, 
the number was never definitely ascertained, and two of the 
soldiers, had been slain in this affray. Upon whom the origi- 
nal responsibility for this most unhappy collision ought to rest, 
it is not easy nor is it at this time important to decide. That 



78 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLA:^^. 

the real leaders of the secession movement in Maryland should 
have deliberately planned it, is altogether improbable. Those 
leaders were perfectly well aware that they were destitute of 
the means of arming even a small proportion of their own 
party, and it would have been sheer madness in them thus to 
invite the establishment of the Federal power by force in Bal- 
timore, and thus to impress upon their projected enterprise, at 
its outset, a character of lawlessness and mob violence. To 
them and to their plans, indeed, the riot of April 19th was a 
fatal blow. Once again the telegraph, which had already 
played so tragical a part in the grand catastrophe of the nation, 
by concentrating and condensing the passions of the most 
widely separated communities, drew the natural "excitement 
and just indignation of the whole North into a single thunder- 
burst. Years before, Mr. Jefferson, writing to Destutt de 
Tracy,* had congratulated his country on the hope of per- 
manence for its institutions afforded by " its great extent, and 
the small portion, comparatively, which could ever be con- 
vulsed at one time by local passion." 

" When frenzy and dt-lusion," he had said, " like an epi- 
demic, gain certain parts, tlie residue remain sound and un- 
touched, and hold on till their brethren can recover from the 
temporary delusion." But the steam-engine and the telegraph, 
the boasted ministers of peace and good-will, harmony and 
mutual understanding, among mankind, now lent themselves 
to the service of the passions most fatal to peace and good- 
will, to harmony and to mutual understanding. They had 
annihilated the wholesome action of time and deliberation in 
this supreme crisis of national affairs. 

The smoke had hardly Ufted from the streets of Baltimore, 
when a cry for vengeance — blind, immediate, and overwhelm- 
ing — went up from all the North. The press, which had long 
since ceased to lead the public mind and contented itself with 
giving voice to the extremest passions of the hour, rang with 
* Jefferson's Works, vol. v., p 570. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. MoCLELLAN^. 79 

appeals to arms. " Through Baltimore or over it," was the 
unreflecting response of the North to the madness of a mob 
as unreflecting. 

For the moment, the government of Maryland, and the 
municipal authorities of Baltimore, were entirely paralyzed. 
All travel southward through Baltimore was for some time 
suspended, and the volunteers, who from all parts of the North 
hurried forward at the summons of the " Capital in danger," 
were forced to make their way to Washington by a circuitous 
route through Annapolis. ^ 

Measures, however, of a summary and despotic character 
were soon adopted by the Federal authorities for reducing 
Baltimore. The success which attended those measures, and 
the indifference with which the contest for the possession of 
Maryland was abandoned by the Confederates, must be at- 
tributed, in part, to the rapid development of the Northern 
determination to uphold the policy of the president, and assert 
the supremacy of the laws of the Union ; in part to the cha- 
otic and uncertain condition of affairs at the South ; and in 
part, also, to an aversion then general throughout the South, 
from the prospect of seeing Maryland introduced into the 
Southern Confederacy. 

This aversion had its origin in a variety of considerations. 

Those among the Southern leaders who, like President 
Davis and a majority of his cabinet, regarded secession as a 
grand political expedient to result " in a suitable political and 
civil union, adequate to the security of both sections at home 
and abroad,"* hoped that Maryland, remaining in the Union, 
might exert upon the policy of the Federal government an 
influence favorable to peace, forbearance, and compromise. 
The chiefs of the party which aimed at a permanent separa- 
tion, and the foundation of a great Southern Confederacy, felt 

* Judge Campbell, of Alabama, in " A Statement and Vindication of 
Certain Political Opinions." (By the Hon. Wm. B. Reed, of Philadel- 
phia.) PMladelphia, 1863. 



80 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

that Maryland was rather in name than in fact a slave State ; 
nor had they any desire to see so prosperous a commercial city 
as Baltimore embraced within the borders of their new Re- 
public, there to compete with the less powerfully developed 
mercantile interest of the further South, for the control of 
that magnificent commerce which they believed must rapidly 
flow in from every quarter of the globe upon the seaboard 
towns of the Confederacy. 

Visions, plans, theories, and schemes of all sorts, however, 
were destined now to disappear on both sides, under the 
swiftly advancing realities of war. On the 9th of May the 
Confederate president issued a proclamation declaring that 
war existed between the United and Confederate States, and 
notifying mankind of his intention to issue letters of marque 
and reprisal in response to -the blockade of the Southern ports. 

Before the end of the month Tennessee, Arkansas, and 
North Carolina, with Virginia, had joined the Confederacy of 
the South, and accepted in its provisional character the provi- 
sional government established at Montgomery, which had al- 
ready raised, without difficulty, a loan of five millions of dollars, 
and was distributing military commissions, and pushing for- 
ward military organizations throughout the Southern States. 

Partly as a military measure, and partly, no doubt, for the 
purpose of controlling the conflicting political elements which 
threatened to paralyze the movement of secession in its incep- 
tion, the government of Jefierson Davis was suddenly trans- 
ferred, on the 21st of May, to Richmond, in Virginia, a point 
at which the main lines of communication running through the 
South and Southwest converged, and affording an excellent 
base of operations, whether offensive or defensive, in the face 
of the Federal forces now rapidly assembling at Washington 
and in the State of Maryland. 

The reception which the Confederate president met with in 
Richmond was very far from being satisfactory. He found 
the Virginian authorities neither friendly to himself personally, 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 81 

nor disposed to abdicate the control of affairs in favor of his 
administration on the plea of military necessity. For many 
days those about his person trembled for his safety whenever 
he appeared in public ; and the Confederate secretary of war, 
who had made himself ridiculous at Montgomery by a speech 
delivered on the day of the surrender of Fort Sumter, in which 
he prophesied the invasion and subjugation of the North, found 
the " Virginia forces" no more disposed to accept orders from 
his department, or from officers commissioned by the Southern 
president, than were the New England troops of 1775 to ac- 
quiesce in the appointment of Washington to the supreme 
command of the colonial armies. The greatest efforts were 
accordingly made to bring forward into Virginia, in the short- 
est possible time, the largest possible force of troops from other 
States of the Confederacy. 

The carrying capacity of the Southern railways was taxed to 
the utmost, and from the end of May to the end of June, sol- 
diers, from all parts of the South, arrived in Richmond at the 
rate of from fifteen hundred to two thousand men daily. 

These were the flower of the Southern populations ; stalwart 
mountaineers from Tennessee, the descendants of those bold 
borderers who had fought for the independence of the State of 
Franklin ; staunch Presbyterians from the highlands of North 
Carolina, the heirs of those whose Mecklenburg protest against 
Parliamentary usurpation antedates the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence itself; gigantic up-countrymen from Georgia and 
South Carolina ; high-spirited planters from the seaboard and 
the lower Mississippi ; fire-breathing citizens from Charleston 
and Savannah, Mobile and New Orleans. 

Of arms and equipments these new levies had no lack, and 
of the war spirit more than a sufficiency. But their disciplire 
was in most cases deplorable, and although many of their offi- 
cers were men of respectable military training and experience, 
the army as a whole was in truth little better than a brave and 
clamorous mob. Their confidence in their own invincibility 



82 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. ^ 

was only equalled by their contempt for the soldiery of the 
North. The conviction which possessed the minds of the lead- 
ing men of the Confederate government that the war could not 
outlast a few months at furthest was universal among them, 
and contributed, with the novel excitements of the crisis, and 
with the mihtary pomp, parade, and circumstance of the hour, 
to maintain them in a kind of rapture of reckless expectation. 

Meanwhile the war fever was raging with an equal heat at 
the North. The troops called out by President Lincoln had 
been summoned into the field for three months, and it was gen- 
erally believed that sixty days would see them returning in an 
almost bloodless triumph from the overthrow of the pretended 
government at Richmond. The great West and the New 
England States vied with each other in the vehemence of their 
zeal for this " short, sharp, and decisive" war, which was sum- 
marily to chastise the treason in which Southern insolence had 
finally culminated. In this tempest of passion all hope, and 
even all desire, of a tolerant and reasonable settlement of the 
national difficulties soon disappeared. Each section felt itself 
to be absolutely iu the right, and neither consequently cared 
or would for a moment essay to comprehend the objects or do 
justice to the position of the other. 

The great majority of thinking men at the South believed, 
with Madison in his reply to Patrick Henry, that the national 
government was intended " to be binding on the people of a 
State only by their own separate consent," and they necessa- 
rily, therefore, looked upon the coercive invasion of a State by 
the Federal forces as a wicked assault upon the very life of the 
Constitution. The masses of the Southern people sharing this 
belief, and imbued also with an intense conviction of the aboli- 
tionist tendencies of the North, rose as one man to repel what 
they regarded as a deliberate attempt to extirpate the institu- 
tions and annihilate the prosperity of the South. 

On the other hand that great m^'ority of the people of the 
North which cherished no animosity against the South on the 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 83 

question of slavery, was inflamed by a passionate love of the 
Union, and filled with a very genuine amazement and horror 
by the idea that its disruption should be seriously attempted. 

No time or opportunity was to be afforded for bringing 
about a truce of intelligence between these great populations, 
thus fiercely and suddenly thrown the one against the other 
by the wave of events. 

Everything was done, on the contrary, which could be done, 
to excite the passions of either section, and to widen the breach 
between them. A reign of terror began both at the North 
and at the South. 

At the South, " Vigilance Committees" and " Committees 
of Public Safety" set themselves to the task of driving out of 
the country all whose fidelity to Southern principles, and whose 
loyalty to Southern institutions, could be possibly called in 
question. In some of the States, the State governments at- 
tempted to curb this irresponsible violence ; but without much 
success. In Virginia, an act was passed by the convention, 
which substantially conferred upon the governor of that com- 
monwealth the power of abrogating all the guaranties of per- 
sonal liberty in the case of Northern citizens whom he might 
think proper to suspect of designs against the State. The Con- 
federate government was poweness either to inflict injustice or 
to prevent its infliction ; and for many months life and liberty, 
in many parts of the South, were held at the caprice of private 
malignity and of popular passion. 

In the more densely populated and more highly civilized 
North, the excitement of the people vented itself more rarely 
in the form of popular outrages upon individuals. It poured 
itself through the body corporate of the government, and rap- 
idly infused into the administration of the Republic all the 
unscrupulous and untrammelled vigor of a mihtary despotism. 
Since the day when the dispatches of the American commis- 
sioners in Paris stung the nation to its feet with the news that 
the Directory of France had dared pretend to levy tribute in 



84 LIFE OF GEN^. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

America, no such abdication of all other considerations in be- 
half of strengthening the government had been witnessed in 
the United States. As in 1798, so again in 1861, the people 
and their rulers underwent a common effervescence of mingled 
fear and rage, in which, however, the element of rage now 
enormously predominated over the element of fear. " Every 
thing was thought possible, and every thing justifiable." To 
speak of compromise was disloyalty, to deprecate the policy 
of war was to embrace the hopes of treason. Men were ar- 
rested without a warrant, imprisoned without a hearing, dis- 
charged without a trial. The mails were violated ; domiciliary 
visits were made in the dead of night ; a vast machinery of 
espionage and of denunciation shook ^e confidence of private 
life, and silenced in public the wholesome voices of political 
debate. 

As the tide of passion rose on either side, all the influences 
most hostile to the public interest and to general peace rose 
with it to the surface of affairs. The armies which either gov- 
ernment had been authorized to raise were large beyond all 
precedent in America ; and as few persons in either section 
had yet at all divined the proportions of the evil that was 
coming upon them, all that was adventurous and ardent, all 
that was scheming and ambitious, in either section, pressed 
forward for a place in the front of war. 

The prowess of the South was ridiculed at the North, the 
prowess of the North was ridiculed at the South. The great 
wars which mark our time, the war of the Crimea and the war 
of Italy, have aroused the military spirit again throughout the 
world, and nowhere has its recrudescence been more signal 
than in America. Thousands of young men in both sections 
responded to the blare of the trumpet and the roll of the 
drum in a sort of martial infatuation, while thousands more 
rushed to the field, impatient to vindicate, in a single conclu- 
sive ordeal by battle, the impugned valor of the section to 
which the^ belonged. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 85 

The president of the Confederates was himself a soldier, 
and, so far as circumstances would permit, he secured to his 
own armies the important advantage of a body of officers, 
selected with some regard to their military knowledge and 
experience. 

The North was less fortunate in this particular. Many par- 
tisans of the new Federal administration, who had necessarily 
been disappointed of political preferment in the distribution of 
a patronage of which the offices disposable were in proportion 
to those seeking them as one to thirty, eagerly pressed upon 
President Lincoln their claims to military appointments ; and 
the president thankfully seized upon so happy an opportunity 
of hquidating past obligations and securing future support. 
That it was impossible to make a man a judge or a collector 
of customs, was accepted as an excellent reason for appointing 
him a brigadier-general. 

On either side the most respectable, the most odious, and 
the most ridiculous traits of human nature, were thus impar- 
tially enlisted to precipitate the dread collision of war be- 
tween the now widely sundered section? of the American 
nationality. 



CHAPTER III. 

COMMENCEMENT OF THE WAR. CONDITION OP PIIBLIC SENTIMENT, AND 
OF THE MELITABY FORCE IN THE TWO CONTENDING SECTIONS. THE 
CAMPAIGN OP WESTERN VIRGINIA. GENERAL McCLELLAN CALLED 
TO WASHINGTON. 

The two great sections into which the American States had 
by the force of circumstances been gradually di\dded, having 
at last, imder the stress of political passions and social exasper- 
ation, become engaged in arms, the one against the other, it 
rested mainly with the more powerful of the two, and with 
the one which claimed to represent the true idea of the na- 
tional unity, to decide how and for what objects the impend- 
ing war should be waged. 

The majority of the ISTorthern people, as we have seen, had 
no very definite views, nor, indeed, any very positive feelings 
on this point. They were content to accept the policy of the 
government whatever that might be. A well-considered ap- 
prehension of the probable results, immediate and remote, of 
the secession of the Southern States upon ISTorthern greatness 
and Northern progress, might and no doubt would have dic- 
tated a policy to the people themselves. But no such well- 
considered apprehension existed or could exist among a people 
to whom the whole of the great drama upon which they were 
entering was an amazement and a dream. 

With the exception of the small and insignificant minority 
of those who sympathized with the secessionists of the South, 
the whole North and West were united in the determination 
to meet force by force, and uphold at all hazards the authority 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 87 

of the Union. But as to the true condition of the South, and 
the best steps to be taken in carrying out this determination, 
great diversities of opinion existed. Into the details of these 
diversities it is unnecessary for us here to enter. Let it suffice 
to say, that two grand theories of action were evolved from 
them, each of which had its partisans and supporters in or 
about the immediate body of the administration. 

The first of these theories recognized the facts of secession 
as they actually existed; the second accepted them as they 
appeared in the mist of popular astonishment and sectional 
passion at the North. According to the first theory, the or- 
ganization of eleven States, containing a population three times 
as large as that of the Colonies which revolted against the 
British crown in 1776, and embracing an area of territory half 
as large as Europe, under a regular system of Federal govern- 
ment, able to command all the resources of those States in 
money and in men, was a reality too formidable to be lightly 
dealt with. Those who adopted this view of the position, 
insisted that the military preparations of the government to 
assail and overthrow the antagonist authority, thus erected 
and established, should be at least as carefully considered and 
as effectively carried out as they would be were it the inten- 
tion of the government to invade the American possessions of 
Great Britain or the Republic of Mexico. And they insisted 
upon this the more strenuously that political considerations of 
the highest importance were involved in the case actually be- 
fore them, which would by no means enter into the case of an 
invasion of the British territories or of Mexico. The object 
of the war against the South being simply the restriction of 
the South within the limits of its constitutional obligations, it 
was evident that if the war were not so conducted as to secure 
this object, with the least possible loss of life and property, 
and the least possible inflammation of popular feeling at the 
South, the war must inevitably aggravate the mischief it was 
expected to abate. 



88 LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 

To this end, they maintained, it was essential that no Wow 
should be struck unless with a moral certainty of success ; and 
that it would be better to spend many months in the prepara- 
tion of an army which should be reasonably adequate to the 
enormous work it was to attempt, than to risk the indefinite 
prolongation and extension of the conflict by such an ill-advised 
opening of the war as must, in all military probability, result 
in the failure of the Federal invasion. 

Those who thus reasoned, were fortified in their conclusions 
by the further reflection, that the secession of the Southern 
States was not a well-organized act of revolution, but an ex- 
plosion of popular passion. They saw nothing in the Consti- 
tution of the Confederacy to which the secession had given 
birth, to encours^ge the belief that it could long commend 
itself to the support of the majority of the States which com- 
posed it. They recognized the existence of such an essential 
antagonism of interests and tendencies between the Southern 
States of the lower Atlantic and the Gulf on the one hand, 
and the Southern States of the border on the other, as must 
infallibly make itself felt at once in the councils of the new 
federation ; and they believed it to be the course of true wis- 
dom to allow these internal forces to work for the disruption 
of the ties so hastily and so passionately formed. At the 
same time they perceived that the Northern people also need- 
ed to be disciplined and schooled by calmer reflection than is 
possible to any people amid the heats and clamors of actual 
war, into a proper comprehension of their own mistakes and 
their own responsibilities in this matter. 

In a word, with men of this way of thinking, the maxim 
laid down by Lieutenant-Gen eral Scott, in a remarkable letter 
on the prospects of the country, addressed by him to Presi- 
dent Buchanan, on the 30th of October, 1860, still held good. 
They believed, with the only American who had ever success- 
fully conducted a war of invasion, a veteran whose life's expe- 
rience embraced the most critical periods of the nation's his- 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 89 

tory, that it was " a great object to gain time" for the cooling 
of the popular passions and the precipitation of the popular 
reason. 

But these men were confronted in the government by an 
overwhelming majority of the adherents of a totally different 
theory, in which the movement of secession and the establish- 
ment of the Southern Confederacy appeared as the impotent 
and contemptible uprising of a handful of demoralized politi- 
cians Against the colossal power of a great people and of its 
government. Those who looked upon matters in this light, 
were fully convinced that, to the immediate annihilation of all 
resistance to the Federal authority, nothing more would be 
necessary than the dispersion of the bands of insurgents as- 
sembled at Richmond for the protection of the arch-conspira- 
tors engaged in this audacious treason. They regarded the 
rebellion of the South as a riot, and the army of the South as 
a mob.* 

The almost universal ignorance of the real nature and neces- 
sities of war which existed in America, contributed at once to 
strengthen these convictions, and -to increase the influence of 
these men. The educated military men of the United States 
were few in number, and quite destitute of influence as a class. 
Their own experience of war, indeed, was for the most part of 
the most limited character. Few of those highest in rank 
among them had ever seen an army arrayed for actual service ; 
fewer still had ever borne a part in the operations of a grand 
campaign conducted against a powerful enemy. The military 
traditions of the nation, too, bore very much the same relation 
to the realities of its military history, as the legends of the 
Paladins of Charlemagne bear to the realities of the Pyrenean 
fights between the Saracens and the Franks. 

* Two years after the outbreak of the war we find Governor Andrew 
of Massachusetts announcing, with the air of a discoverer, to his people 
at Worcester, that we are " engaged in a war and not in putting down 
a riot" ! 



90 XIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCiLELLAM". 

Remote from the contact of powerful neighbors, and mar- 
vellously favored by the accidents of climate, soil, and geo^ 
graphical position, the people of the United States had been 
educated into an overweening self-confidence, a contempt of 
probabilities, and an indifference to the laws of success, which 
were now about to bear their bitter but wholesome fruit of 
disaster and disappointment. The popular voice was at the 
command of those who were ready to brand prudence as cow- 
ardice, forbearance as disloyalty, and patience as poverty of 
spirit. 

For a time, however, the execution of the policy of war de- 
termined upon by the government was necessarily confided to 
the man of the largest military experience in America. Lieu- 
tenant-General Scott, in virtue of his position at the head of 
the national army, was charged, in name at least, with the or- 
ganization of the troops called by the president into the field, 
and with the planning of the campaign in which those troops 
were to be employed. 

Mainly in consequence of the representations of Lieutenant- 
General Scott, the president was induced to issue, on the 4th 
of May, a second proclamation, supplementary to his procla- 
mation of April 14th, and to caU upon the States to furnish 
more than forty thousand additional troops, to be enlisted for 
three years or for the war. An increase of the regular army 
was also ordered by the president in advance of the action of 
Congress, summoned to meet at Washington, in an " extra 
session," on the 4th of July, 1861. 

Assuming that the war about to be waged was to be, in- 
deed, a war, it was evident that success was only to be looked 
for by the armies of the Union from a strict obedience to the 
principles of the art of war. 

To assail the armies of the Confederates from the Atlantic 
coast, and drive them back upon the mountain fastnesses of 
the interior, commanding so great and fertile an extent of ter- 
ritory, the very heart of their strength and hope, was mani- 



LIFB OF GEN. QEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 91 

festly absurd. The United States possessed but one positive 
military advantage over the States in rebellion, and this was 
the control of the sea. Treating the coast line of the Confed- 
eracy as a strong position held by the Union forces, it was 
evidently the dictate of sound strategic principles so to com- 
bine the land assaults of the Federal armies as to drive their 
adversary, when defeated, outward upon this coast line. 

It was in accordance with this simple and comprehensive 
view of the position that Lieutenant-General Scott endeavored 
to organize his first plans of campaign. But he soon found 
that whatever deference might be paid to him, there were 
certain objects which he would be positively compelled to aim 
at without any regard to their harmony or their discord with 
his general intentions. 

Foremost among these objects was the reduction of Rich- 
mond. 

The government of the Confederates had scarcely estab- 
lished itself at Richmond before it became evident that the 
main force and virulence of the approaching contest would be 
concentrated upon the attack and defence of that capital. 

Though the border States fi'om the mountain line of West- 
ern Virginia to the frontiers of Kansas were in a state of fer- 
mentation and confusion, and it was already becoming appar- 
ent that the fury of the war must soon blaze out along the 
course of the Mississippi and in the central West, the Confed- 
erate government pressed forward the great majority of the 
forces raised throughout the South into Tide-water and Pied- 
mont Virginia. It is probable that Lieutenant-General Scott, 
had he been left to his own judgment, would have acted upon 
the TsTapoleonic maxim of refusing to meet his enemy where 
that enemy invites the attack, and " for the simple reason that 
he there invites the attack." But he was not permitted to do 
this ; and in the end of May he proceeded to organize an in- 
vasion of Eastern Virginia. 

The forces assembled at Washington under the orders of 



92 LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. MoCLELLAN. 

Lieutenant-General Scott, and now to be thus employed, were 
respectable in point of numbers ; but such was their condition 
in all other particulars, that they scarcely deserved to be 
styled an army. 

Many of the regiments had reached the capital without 
arms, and much delay had occurred in arming them. Their 
field and line officers were, for the most part, entu-ely destitute 
of mihtary habits and experience ; and nothing at all resem- 
bling an orderly hierarchy of command existed among them. 
The hopeful nucleus of this heterogeneous body was a small 
force of regular troops ; but the organization of this force, 
small as it was, had been seriously deranged by the secession 
from the Federal army of many officers who had occupied po- 
sitions upon its general staff. 

The " Grand Army of the United States" encamped about 
Washington, at the beginning of June, 1861, was an army 
without a quartermaster's department, Avithout a commissary's 
department, without a medical department, without a general 
staff. It had no adequate force of cavalry ; and no adequate 
force of efficient artillery. Its communication with the North 
were protected by the military occupation of Baltimore, but 
its positions at Washington were not properly intrenched ; and 
if it was to be moved upon a campaign of invasion it must move 
without a fortified base of operations, and, substantially, with- 
out a reserve. 

The preparations, meanwhile, of the Confederates for the 
defense of Virginia against this army were not much more for- 
midable. 

The Southern president, Mr. Davis, a man of military expe- 
rience and military intelligence, was hampered in the work of 
perfecting these preparations by a number of influences. The 
jealous disinclination of Virginia to commit her sword into his 
keeping gravely interfered with the unity of plans and of com- 
mand in the Confederate camp. 

A like disinclination existed in other States, and particularly 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 93 

in Georgia, the governor of which commonwealth refused to 
arm or equip any troops going forward to Virginia unless they 
moved under his own commission. 

Cherishing still the hope that actual war might after all be 
averted, and indisposed to confide in men whose political views 
difiered from his own, Mr. Davis hesitated in his distribution 
of important commands. Notwithstanding the evident con- 
centration of the Federal power upon Virginia, the end of May 
found the Confederate forces in that State scattered without 
any combination of positions, and the Confederate leaders still 
without any general plan of defense. 

Batteries had been thrown up on the banks of the Potomac 
and the lower James, although so late as in the end of April 
the city of Richmond had been thrown into a panic by the re- 
ported approach of a single Federal war-steamer. The hostile 
visitor proved to be a passenger steamer, from Norfolk, which 
narrowly escaped annihilation from a six-pounder cannon has- 
tily dragged to a height near the city. But so entirely without 
defense was the river throughout its course, that had a single 
Federal war-steamer been indeed dispatched upon the errand, 
there can be no doubt that it might have compelled the sur- 
render of Richmond almost without firing a shot. 

Norfolk was occupied by a small Confederate force. Colonel 
J. B. Magruder, formerly of the Federal army, held a position 
near Hampton and Fortress Monroe, with about two thousand 
troops, mainly from North Carolina and Eastern Virginia. 

The defense of Western Virginia had been assumed by Gen- 
eral Lee, commander-in-chief of the Virginia forces, who had 
dispatched to that part of the State Colonel Porterfield, with 
instructions to raise a volunteer force, and to hold the line of 
the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Between the extreme east 
and the extreme west of Virginia lay the main body of the 
Confederates. General Joseph E. Johnston, a cool, wary, and 
experienced ofiicer, distinguished in the Federal army by his 
thorough knowledge of his profession and his great personal gal- 



94 LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. MoCLELLAIT. 

lantry, had been sent with a force, chiefly from Tennessee and 
Mississippi, of less than nine thousand men and thirty guns, by 
Jeflerson Davis, to the important advanced position of Harper's 
Ferry. Alexandria was held by a small body of Virginia cav- 
alry. The bulk of the Confederate forces were concentrating 
at Manassas Junction, a plateau of moderate elevation, twenty- 
five miles west of Alexandria, which commands the intersection 
of the great line of railway leading from Washington to Rich- 
mond with a branch road, called the Manassas Gap Railway, 
which runs westward through the Blue Ridge to the valley of 
the Shenandoah river. This plateau, flanked by two small but 
deeply bedded streams, the river Occoquan and the now world- 
famous Bull Run, was admirably fitted for the purposes of the 
Confederates. The broken and wooded country which sur- 
rounds it is traversed, hke all northern Virginia, both east and 
west of the Shenandoah Valley, by few, and for the most part^ 
miserable roads. Th6 Warrenton turnpike, a good Macadam- 
ized road, which leads from Alexandria west to Centreville, 
twenty-two miles distant, turns at that place to the South, and 
crosses Bull Run at a point now become historical, and known 
as Stone Bridge. 

The Confederate troops here assembled were left under the 
orders of General Bonham, of South Carolina, until the nature 
and proportions of the Federal campaign became irresistibly 
clear, when General Beauregard, who had been previously ap- 
pointed to the defense of the lower Mississippi, was suddenly 
recalled to Virginia, and sent to this important command. 

Lieutenant-General Scott, being required to invest and in- 
vade Virginia, made the best disposition possible of the forces 
under his command. To Fortress Monroe he sent Major- 
General Butler, a lawyer of Massachusetts, who had been a 
conspicuous supporter of the policy of Mr. Jefferson Davis in 
the Democratic party, but who had thrown himself eagerly into 
the war, and happening to be sent into Maryland immediately 
after the Baltimore riots of April 19th, had astonished the 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 05 

government and the country by a kind of unscrupulous Bow- 
street energy, which raised him at once to the rank of a popu- 
lar hero. 

Major-General Patterson, of Pennsylvania, an officer of some 
experience, was moved through Maryland towards Harper's 
Ferry, at the head of a column of twenty thousand men. 

Lieutenant-General Scott himself, with the main body of the 
Union forces, threatened, from Washington, Manassas and the 
road to Richmond. 

The invasion of Western Virginia was committed to Major- 
General McClellan, who was left substantially to take, care of 
himself, make his own plans, and pursue his own policy. 

On the 23d of May, 1861, the Virginia pickets, on duty upon 
the Virginia shore of the Potomac, near Washington, were 
driven from their posts by the midnight advance of the " ad- 
vance guard of the grand army of the United States." 

For some days a Federal war-steamer had been lying off 
Alexandria. Her officers had been exchanging pleasantries 
and courtesies freely enough with the Virginians ; and the lat- 
ter were evidently quite at their ease as to the perils which 
frowned upon them from Washington. The advance of the 
Federal army drove this careless and confident garrison with- 
out a blow from the city. They fell back upon the positions 
at Manassas, leaving this important gateway of Virginia to be 
occupied in force by the Federal troops. 

Ten days after the occupation of Alexandria, on the 3d of 
June, Colonel Porterfield, then lying with eight hundred men 
at Philippa, a village of Western Virginia, was surprised in the 
night by a body of Ohio troops, from the army of General 
McClellan. 

Notwithstanding repeated requests made to him by General 
Johnston, commanding the Confederates at Harper's Ferry, to 
communicate with that post on the subject of the advance of 
the Federal forces, Colonel Porterfield had refused to co-ope- 
rate in any way with that officer. His own command was in 



96 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

a miserable condition, and after its dispersion by the Federals, 
it disappeared in the forests of Western Virginia, and was 
heard of no more, till Colonel Porterfield appeared in Rich- 
mond, to report in person to General Lee the results of his 
campaign. 

This disaster, while it depressed to a certain degree the high- 
wrought popular feeling at the South, materially helped the 
Confederate cause by making the Virginians more willing to 
consolidate their forces with those of the other " allied repub- 
lics ;" and it was not long afterwards balanced in their minds 
by the ignominious defeat at Bethel Church, in Eastern Vir- 
ginia, of a force pushed forward by General Butler, from Fort- 
ress Monroe and Newport N'ews, to attack the North Caro- 
hnians of Colonel Magruder in their intrenchments. The ac- 
tion was in itself insignificant, but it produced a profound im- 
pression throughout both sections. The Confederates had lost 
but one man killed and seven wounded ; the Federals nearly 
one hundred wounded and thirty killed. The confidence of 
the South was inflamed by the victory ; and the dread fact 
that Northern men had fallen in battle by Southern bullets, 
struck home for the first time something hke a sense of the 
realities of war upon the heart of the North. 

A few days after the fight at Bethel Church, on the 15th of 
June, Harper's Ferry was evacuated by GeneralJohnstone ; the 
combined advance of General McClellan from the west, and of 
General Patterson from the northeast, making it necessary for 
that commander to throw himself upon the road of Patterson 
at Winchester, in order to keep open his communications with 
General Beauregard at Manassas Junction. 

The first really important action of the war was now about ^ 
to be fought, and in Western Virginia. 

This was the battle of Rich Mountain. On the 16th of May, 
George B. McClellan, previously commissioned as a major- 
general by the governor of Ohio, had been raised to the same 
rank in the army of the United States. He had already, as a 



IIFB OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAK. 97 

major-general of volunteers, been put in command of the " De- 
partment of the Ohio," comprising the States of Ohio, Illinois, 
Indiana, with portions of Pennsylvania and Virginia. Find- 
ing the government of the United States unable to afford him 
any practical help in the organization of a force for active ope- 
rations. General McClellan twice called the governors of the 
States embraced in his Department into consultation with him- 
self, and eventually succeeded in moving a respectable force of 
troops, mainly from Ohio and Indiana, into Northwestern Vir- 
ginia. On the 25th of April, he occupied the considerable 
town of Parkersburg, and on the next day issued a proclama- 
tion, in which he assured the citizens of Virginia that they and 
iheir property of all descriptions should be protected by the 
army under his command, since he came simply to execute the 
laws, and neither to break nor to make them. The effect of 
this proclamation was excellent ; and when the army of Gen- 
eral McClellan, more efficiently equipped and prepared for ser- 
vice, took the field a month later in Western Virginia, it found 
the Union sentiment of that region a substantial reality. 

The Confederates, however, were not disposed to abandon 
so important a bulwark of their cause without an effort. Gen- 
eral Garnett was appointed in June to the command of the 
Confederate troops in "Western Virginia, and finding General 
McClellan pressing in upon him in force, he proceeded to in- 
trench himself in the strong positions of Rich Mountain and 
Laurel Hill, where he could dispute with the Federal comman- 
der the passage by Huttonsville, through the Alleghanies, into 
Eastern Virginia. 

On the 29th of June General McClellan in person reached 
Clarksburg, twenty-two miles from Grafton, and on the 1st of 
July he moved with eight thousand men, thirty miles^ to Buck- 
hannon, a point from which he could turn the positions of Gen- 
eral Garnett at Laurel Hill, Rich Mountain, and Carrick's 
Ford. Of these positions Rich Mountain was the key, and 



98 LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

was held by Colonel Pegram, of Yirginia, with about two 
thousand men, and seven pieces of artillery. 

The march of Gen. McClellan from Clarksburg to Buckhan- 
non led him through a wild and wooded country filled with 
points from which a serious opposition might with ease have 
been made to his advance. jN'o attempt was made by the 
Confederates to avail themselves of these opportunities. 

From Buckhannon Gen. McClellan rapidly combined his plans 
for the capture of Rich Mountain and Laurel Hill. 

At daybreak on the 11th of July, Brigadier-General Rose- 
crans, with four regiments of infantry, and a troop of cavalry 
from Ohio, moved from the position of General McClellan, in 
front of Rich Mountain, to the attack of Colonel Pegram's 
force, which was strongly intrenched at the foot of the moun- 
tain. Led by a guide of the country, and by Colonel, after- 
wards General Lauder, of Massachusetts, a bold and adven- 
turous pioneer, famihar for years with Rocky Mountain life, 
the column of General Rosecrans took its way for five miles 
through a pathless forest. The trees and the dense under- 
brush were thoroughly wet with the heavy rain of the night 
before, and when the column emerged at noon in a road upon 
the edge of a clearing at the summit, the rain was pouring 
down with renewed violence. 

News of their march had, however, preceded them. A 
dragoon sent after the column with dispatches had fallen, 
about seven o'clock, into the hands of the Confederates. 

Colonel Pegram had instantly notified General Garnett of 
General McClellan's intentions, and urging it upon him to oc- 
cupy a designated point on the road between Rich Mountain 
and Beverly for the purpose of checking the advance of Gen- 
eral McClellan, had dispatched a force of about five hundred 
men with three guns to occupy the summit of Rich Mountain. 

This force opened fire from its hastily constructed intrench- 
ments upon the troops of General Rosecrans as soon as they 
made their appearance on the edge of the forest. The Union 



LIFE OP GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 99 

troops, availing themselves of the cover of the woods, re- 
turned the fire with spirit, and after an irregular but animated 
action the Confederates, their line of breastworks being turned 
by an Indiana regiment, gave way in disorder and fled ; one 
man alone standing his ground and loading and firing a field- 
piece, until he was shot with a revolver at his post. 

General Rosecrans, the field being won, re-formed his troops 
in line of battle and waited events. Colonel Pegram, finding 
himself not attacked by Rosecrans, and learning that the ad- 
vance of General McClellan had not been delayed, attempted 
to make his escape, taking with him reinforcements which had 
been sent forward to him from Beverly. A part of his force, 
dispersed in the trackless forests of the mountains, made its 
way to a place of safety ; but Colonel Pegram himself, with 
about six hundred men, caught upon the banks of the Cheat 
River, with no means of escape, sent in a flag of truce and 
made his surrender to General McClellan on Saturday, July 
13th. 

The inaction of General Rosecrans after the engagement at 
Hart's farm, on Rich Mountain, enabled General Garnett to 
evacuate Laurel Hill during the night. He attempted to 
make his way by the Huttonsville pass to the Staunton road, 
but in consequence of some strange misrepresentation, misdi- 
rection, or misconception of orders, Colonel Scott, who had 
been ordered by General Garnett, in conformity with the sug- 
gestion of Colonel Pegram, to hold the key of the Beverly 
road, had failed so to do. General Garnett was accordingly 
compelled to retreat through the mountains to the southwest. 
His forces were twice overtaken and attacked by the troops of 
General McClellan ; and in the second of these affairs, Gene- 
ral Garnett exposing himself with reckless gallantry, to en- 
courage his men, was killed. His little army was, however, 
brought off in safety after a most difficult and painful march 
through a mountain wilderness. 

The prostration of the Confederate power in Western Vir- 



100 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN*. 

ginia was complete. General McClellan telegraphed to Wash- 
ington the inspirmg news of the capture of a thousand pris- 
oners, with all the stores, baggage, and artillery of the enemy. 
"Secession," he added, "is killed in this country." This 
proved to be no empty boast. 

The judicious measures which General McClellan had six 
weeks before taken to appease the alarms and make easy the 
submission to law of the West Virginia population now bore 
their fruit abundantly. The armed force which had represent- 
ed the rebel government being entirely dispersed, and the 
army of General McClellan conducting itself as in a friendly 
country, the yeomanry of the mountains, never very warmly 
disposed towards the great slaveholding mterest of the further 
South and of Eastern Virginia, rapidly made up their minds 
to stand by the Federal authorit^y. 

After accepting the surrender of " John Pegram, Esquire, 
styhng himself Colonel in the Provisional Army of the Con- 
federate States," General McClellan treated his prisoners with 
marked kindness and consideration, and eventually paroled 
them all. The effect of this course was greatly to indispose 
the majority of these prisoners to the further prosecution of 
hostilities, and for many subsequent months the most passion- 
ate organs of public opinion in the Confederate States toek 
frequent occasion to point out the evil influence upon the Con- 
federate army of conduct so entirely in contrast with the pop- 
ular convictions on the subject of Northern feehng towards 
the South. 

The moral advantages of the victory of Rich Mountain to 
the cause of the Union, great as they were, were not greater 
than its material consequences might have proved *to be, had 
not the successes of the Federals in Western Virginia been 
practically nullified by the terrible disaster which was about 
to overtake them in the East. 

Immediately after the battle of the 11th of July, General 
McClellan advanced his headquarters to Huttonsville, where 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 101 

he held the only pass available in that region, for many miles, 
by which an army could be successfully moved into Eastern 
Virginia. From Huttonsville a decent road leads to Staunton, 
sixty miles distant, a point of great strategic importance, ly- 
ing in the rear both of Winchester, and of Richmond, and 
commanding the lines of the James River canal, and of the 
Virginia and Tennessee Railway. 

Had any unity of design existed at Washington as to the 
prosecution of the war, it is easy to see how favorable an op- 
portunity was here presented for new and formidable move- 
ments against the enemy in Eastern Virginia. As things ac- 
tually were, however, no such results were to be looked for ; 
and General McClellan, learning that the position of affairs in 
the Kanawha Valley was far from satisfactory, prepared him- 
self at once for an effort in that direction, and was on the 
point of moving in person to the assistance of General Cox, 
there commanding, when he was suddenly summoned to 
Washington. 



CHAPTER IV. 

GENERAI. McCLELLAN TAKES COMMAND IN "WASHINGTON, THE BAT- 
TLE OF BULL BUN, AND THE CONDITION OF THE ABMY. CHANGE 
IN THE PROSPECTS OF THE WAR. REORGANIZATION OF THE FORCES. 
GENERAL McCLELLAN APPOINTED TO THE CHIEF COMMAND UPON 
THE RESIGNATION OF GENERAL SCOTT. 

General McClellan, on arriving in Washington, found 
himself called upon not merely to assume the command of an 
army shattered and demoralized by defeat, but to construct a 
military system for a continent at war. 

The persistent opposition of Lieutenant-General Scott to any 
advance of the army at Washington upon the positions of 
Beauregard at Manassas had been overcome by the " pressure" 
which politicians and the press had brought to bear upon the 
president and his cabinet. General Scott knew the true con- 
dition of that army ; he was opposed, to use his own words, 
" to a little war by piecemeal," and he desired time enough to 
organize a force in some degree proportionate to the work 
which was to be done before attempting to do that work. Of 
the whole force called into the field under the president's 
proclamations of April 17th and May 3d, and which amounted 
in the aggregate to about one hundred and fifty thousand men, 
including eighteen thousand sailors, much, more than one half, 
or seventy-five thousand men, had been summoned under arms 
for three months only ; the president's most conspicuous advi- 
sers, if not the president himself, having expected that before 
the expiration of this term the rebel government at Montgom- 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLEIXAN. 103 

ery would have ceased to exist, and the seceding States have 
been restored to their places in the Federal system. 

Of these troops it was perfectly idle to expect anything like 
effective service in a campaign of invasion. The testimony 
taken by the Committee on the Conduct of the War in respect 
to the battle of Bull Run conclusively proves that it was hardly 
worth while to seek for strategic explanations of the results of 
that battle elsewhere than in the simple fact of its having been 
fought at all. General McDowell, who commanded the expe- 
dition, and with whose plan of operations it is not easy to find 
any substantial fault, testifies : " I had had no opportunity to 
test my*machinery, to move it around and see whether it would 
work smoothly or not. In fact, such was the feeling, that when 
I had one body of eight regiments reviewed together, the gen- 
eral censured me for it, as if I was trying to make some show." 
" I wanted very much a little time ; all of us wanted it. We 
did not have a bit of it. The answer was, * You are green, it 
is true, but they are green also ; you are all green alike.' We 
went on in that way." 

Of such a way there was but one end. 

The country could not understand, ignorant as it was of war 
and war's requirements, how it could possibly be true that 
after three months of preparation and of parade an army of 
thirty thousand men should be still utterly unfit to move thirty 
miles against a series of earthworks held by no more than an 
equal number of other men. Those whose duty it was to en- 
lighten the country were as much in the dark on the subject 
themselves as their fellow-citizens, and the few military men 
who pleaded for patience and practical measures got neither 
justice nor comprehension at their hands. Not all military 
men, it is true, did so plead. Professional rivalry, jealousy, 
envy ; the desire of promotion and of conspicuous command ; 
in some cases a mere craving for the popularity to be so easily 
won by falling in with the public clamor of the hour, led some 
men who should have known better, and probably did know 



104 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

better, into reinforcing the " pressure" which was driving so 
many brave but undisciplined men to useless slaughter. 

The battle was fought. A "foolish affair," to use the lan- 
guage of Gen. Barnard, which preceded it on the 18th of July, 
contributed greatly to heighten the confidence of the enemy 
and to disturb the morale of the advancing army. But so far 
as the troops actually engaged on the 21st of July were led 
and manoeuvred into fighting, they fought for the most part 
gallantly and well, with the bravery which is common to their 
race. There were exceptions, of course, as in the case of that 
regiment of which Major Barry testifies : " When I rode in 
among them and implored them to stand, telling tkem that 
the guns would never be captured if they would only stand, 
they seemed to be paralyzed, standing with their eyes and 
mouths wide open, and did not seem to hear me." 

But in the great majority of instances the men broke because 
nobody "rode in among them and implored them to stand.'' 
New troops, unaccustomed to being killed, and confused by 
the noise and the sudden movements incident to a battle, can- 
not very safely be left to the light of nature. Captain Griffin 
testifies : " A great many of our regiments turned right off the 
field as they delivered their fire, turning even as they delivered 
their volleys. They did not go off in any system at all, but 
went right off as a crowd would walking the street, every man 
for himself, with no organization at all." 

Colonel Davis, himself a volunteer officer, testifies : " I can 
tell you what I think is the cause of the whole defeat of that 
day. The troops were raw ; the men had been accustomed to 
look to their colonels as the only men to give them commands. 
They did not understand the command devolving in succession 
■upon the lieutenant-colonel, major, and the captains in their 
order of rank. The officers themselves did not know what to 
do ; they were themselves raw and green. Every man went in 
to do his duty, and knew nothing about anybody else. When 
the colonels were killed or wounded the subordinate officers 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 105 

did not know what to do, and the men did not know whether 
to obey them or not. When they lost their commanding offi- 
cers, or those to whom alone they had been instructed to look 
for commands, they supposed they had a right to leave the 
field. That, I think, was the cause of many regiments retiring 
from the field ; not from any cowardice or fear of fighting, 
but because, having lost their colonels, they supposed they 
were out of the battle." 

The battle once over and definitely lost, the army, of course, 
morally speaking, became a mob. Much fault has been found, 
not, perhaps unnaturally, with the very vivid colors in which 
Mr. Russell of the London Times has painted the retreat from 
Manassas ; and it is certainly but fair that justice should be done 
to the firm front displayed by the Union reserves at Centreville. 
But the victorious enemy, exhausted by the conflict, did not 
make any serious pursuit on the day of the victory ; and they 
were prevented by political considerations, against which Gen- 
eral Beauregard indignantly but vainly contended, from fol- 
lowing up their advantage by an attempt upon Washington.* 
Had they made such an attempt the real extent of the demor- 
alization sufiered by the Union army in consequence of the 
disastrous day of Manassas would have been fully and terribly 
revealed. 

General Keyes, who of course did not understand at that 
time the reasons which withheld the enemy from moving upon 

* " In conclusion, it is proper, and doubtless expected, that through 
this report my countrymen should be made acquainted with some of the 
sufficient causes that prevented the advance of our forces and a more 
vigorous pursuit of the enemy to and beyond the Potomac. The war 
department has been fully advised long since of all those causes, some 
of w?dch only are proper to be here communicated." — Gen. Beauregard's 
Official Report of the Battle of Manassas. Southern History of the War. 
Richardson, New York, p. 31. This report of General Beauregard was 
not made public at the South until the winter of 1862, and it was well 
understood that the Louisiana general, in the first draft of his report, 
had been much more explicit in his allusions to the policy of President 
Davis. 



106 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

the capital, testified before the committee on the conduct of 
the war in January, 1862 : " There was a striking want of gen- 
eralship on the other side for not following us. If they had 
followed us they might have come pell-mell into the capital.' 
The same witness declared that " the troops then were not in 
a state of sufficient discipline to enable any man living to have 
had an absolute command of them." 

The defeat at Manassas, in short, was not an ordinary defeat 
of an army. It was the breaking down of a system. 

From the outbreak of the war Lieutenant-General Scott, in 
virtue of his position at the head of the regular army of the 
Union, had been at the head also of all the forces called into 
the field. But he had by no means been permitted to handle 
these forces as an army, to count upon them in the organiza- 
tion of any complete plan of campaign, or even to organize 
any such plan. It being considered certain that the war would 
soon be over, the leading organs and leading politicians of the 
administration had not shrunk from the responsibility of con- 
trolling its conduct. General McDowell testifies before the 
Comhiittee on the Conduct of the War : " I had begged of the 
Secretary of War, and the Secretary of the Treasury^ who at 
that time was connected with the Secretary of War i7i 7)%any 
of the plans and organizations going forward^ that I should 
not be obliged to organize and discipline and march and fight 
all at the same time. I said that it was too much for any per- 
son to do. But they could not help it, or did not help it, and 
the thing went on until this project of the march on Manassas 
was broached." 

The same witness testifies that General Scott's plans were 
discussed in the Cabinet, and adds in respect to one of those 
plans : " I do not think well of that plan, and was obliged to 
speak against it in the Cabinet ;" thus revealing to us the fact 
that great military operations, which could only be successfully 
conducted on the condition of an absolute unity of command 
and a consequent absolute secresy in respect to their object 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 107 

and their details, were made the theme of Cabinet meetings 
where the commander-in-chief was forced into elaborate debate 
with Aulic councillors, military and civil. 

The disaster of Manassas suddenly changed the aspect of 
affairs. The most careless and ignorant and noisy of the poli- 
ticians who surrounded the President ; the Senators, hke Mr. 
Chandler, of Michigan, whose sufficient theory of the war Avas 
summed up in the conviction that " it was a bragging, lying 
force that the enemy were exhibiting along our lines ;" and 
the representatives who had voted for an adjournment of Con- 
gress to enable them to go to the front and see the spectacle 
of the overthrow of the rebels at Manassas, were silenced for 
the moment by the new and ominous look of things. 

It became evident that the march to Richmond was to be 
something more serious than a promenade ; that the post of a 
brigadier-general was likely to be more dangerous if not more 
honorable than a private station ; that plans of warfare organ- 
ized by secretaries of the treasury, cabinet councils, and vehe- 
ment journaHsts, might entail mischief upon their authors as 
well as upon the country. 

It was felt that we were about to have war in earnest ; that 
we must meet it with a real array ; and that this army must 
have a real head. 

The spirit of the people rose magnificently to meet the 
emergency. The indignation which had been excitedly the cap- 
ture of Fort Sumter, had been unattended by any feeling of 
humiliation. The flag of the Union had been lowered there 
indeed to the cannon of an enemy. But it had been lowered 
only after a gallant resistance to an overwhelming force. 

The defeat at Manassas on the contrary was a sectional if 
not national humiliation. President Davis and his advisers, in 
restraining General Beauregard from an advance upon Wash- 
ington, have been commonly held to have done the cause of 
the Union an unintentional service. It may perhaps be doubt- 
ed whether they might not have done the cause a far greater 



108 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

service had they suffered the fiery Creole to work his wiU. 
Sternly and swiftly as the Northern people rose in arms to re- 
assert their character for conduct and courage in battle, so 
shamefully imj^ugijed at Manassas, their uprising would pro- 
bably have been still sterner and more swift had the crowning 
disgrace of the loss of the capital been inflicted ; while that 
revolution in the military policy and management of the ad- 
ministration, which was only partially effected by the sharp 
lesson of the 21st of July, 1861, might in that case have been 
made complete and final. 

The appointment of General McClellan to the command va- 
cated by the defeat and the consequent though unjust disgrace 
of General McDowell, was made at the suggestion of Lieuten- 
ant-General Scott. But the general voice of the country rein- 
forced the advice of the veteran commander, and smoothed 
the President's transition to a saner and more practical sys- 
tem of military administration. 

For a time everything Avas committed to the hands of the 
young general; for the secretaries of the treasury, Aulic 
councillors, and vehement journalists who had managed and 
mismanaged the whole military machinery of the country from 
the appointment of hospital nurses up to the nomination of 
major-generals, before the awful day of Manassas, could by no 
means see their way clearly through the chaos which had since 
supervened ; and were in no wise indisposed to shift the bur- 
den of organizing the war upon competent and responsible 
shoulders. 

The work was indeed a labor of Hercules. General Mc- 
Clellan has given but the merest outline of its colossal propor- 
tions in the following simple statement of the condition of 
things at the time when he entered upon the duties of his new 
position : 

" When I assumed command in Washington on the 27th of 
July, 1861, the number of troops in and around the city was 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. MoCLELLAN. 109 

about 50,000 infantry, less than 1,000 cavalry, and 650 artil- 
lerymen, with nine imperfect field-batteries of thirty pieces. 

" On the Virginia bank of the Potomac the brigade organiza- 
tion of General McDowell still existed, and the troops were 
stationed at and in rear of Fort Corcoran, Arlington, and Fort 
Albany, at Fort Runyon, Roach's Mills, Cole's Mill, and in 
the vicinity of Fort Ellsworth, with a detachment at the The- 
ological Seminary. 

" There were no troops south of Hunting Creek, and many of 
the regiments were encamped on the low grounds bordering 
the Potomac, — seldom in the best positions for defence, and 
entirely inadequate in numbers and condition to defend the 
long line from Fort Corcoran to Alexandria. 

" On the Maryland side of the river, upon the heights over- 
looking the Chain Bridge, two regiments were stationed, 
whose commanders were independent of each other. 

*' There were no troops on the important Tenallytown road, 
or on the roads entering the city from the south. 

" The camps were located without regard to purposes of 
defence or instruction ; the roads were not picketed, and there 
was no attempt at an organization into brigades. 

" In no quarter were the dispositions for defence such as to 
offer a vigorous resistance to a respectable body of the enemy 
either in the positions and numbers of the troops, or the num- 
ber and character of the defensive works. Earthworks in the 
nature of ' tetes-de-pont ' looked upon the approaches to the 
Georgetown aqueduct and ferry, the Long Bridge, and Alex- 
andria by the Little River Turnpike and some simple defen- 
sive arrangements were made at the Chain Bridge. With the 
latter exception, not a single defensive work had been com- 
menced on the Maryland side. 

" There was nothing to prevent the enemy shelling the city 
from heights, within easy range, which could be occupied by 
a hostile column almost without resistance. Many soldiers 
had deserted, and the streets of Washington were crowded 



110 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

with straggling officers and men, absent from their stations 
•without authority, whose behavior indicated the general want 
of discipline and organization." 

To this let us add, that it was necessary to organize com- 
pletely and, as the Prince de Joinville very justly says, " with- 
out any assistance from the past," the administrative services 
for provisions, munitions and transports, the artillery reserves, 
the engineer corps, the pontoon corps, the topographical bri- 
gade, the telegraphs and the hospital system for an army of 
three hundred thousand men, and we may begin to form some 
fair conception of the task which General McClellan under- 
took when he accepted the distinction conferred upon him at 
the end of July, 1861. 

Such a conception it is necessary for every man to form, who 
honestly wishes to' understand the part which General McClel- 
lan has played in this great war, and to do justice to the abil- 
ity and the success with which that part has been filled. 

The subsequent career of General McClellan as a comman- 
der in the field is far more likely to fix the public attention 
than the story of the months which he passed at Washington, 
in the later summer and the autumn of 1861, in bringing order 
out of confusion, system out of chaos, plans and a purpose out 
of incoherent passion and vainglorious optimism. 

But the whole future of the war, so far as concerned its 
material machinery, was in those months of colossal and 
almost unrecognized toil. It was in those months that our 
Western as well as our Eastern armies were planned and 
moulded into form. Fort Donelson and Yicksburg, Stone 
River and Chattanooga, as well as Williamsburg and Fair 
Oaks, Malvern Hill and Antietam, were then preparing, then 
were made possible. 

It may be said by those who have made up their minds not 
to believe anything good of a general who has become a Dem- 
ocratic candidate for the presidency, that some other com- 
mander in the place of General McClellan at this time might 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. Ill 

have done as well as he the great work which then was done ; 
and this is one of those assertions of which in the nature of 
things it is idle to attempt to prove a negative. All that we 
positively know is, that if the foundations of our military suc- 
cesses had not been laid deeply and well during those critical 
months which followed the disaster of Manassas, we never 
should have had any military successes at all. 

If Manassas had not been fought and lost ; if the system, or 
want of system, which gave us that action as the result of 
three months of planning and preparation, had been pushed 
into the autumn of 1861, the spring of 1862 would have found 
us without an army worthy of the name, either in the East or 
in the West. What the consequences of such a condition of 
affairs, as well to the domestic as to the foreign aspects of the 
war for the Union, might have been, it is not very easy to say. 
What they probably would have been it is certainly far from 
pleasant to imagine. 

We all know now how full of brilliant promise for the arms 
of the Union the whole field of operations began to seem a 
few months after the general organization of the war had been 
confided to the young general from Western Virginia. But 
the identification of General McClellan's name and fortunes 
with those of the army which he himself led into the field has 
become so complete that much less than justice is commonly 
done, even when no injustice is meant to be done to him, in 
respect to those vast preliminary labors and their results on 
the destiny of campaigns in which he took no active and ap- 
parent part. 

The records of the War Department, however, will one day 
bear out the assertion made by the New York Times of April 
13, 1862, at least so far as concerns the honorable revelations 
concei-ning General McClellan which sleep in their huge files : 

" There are important facts connected with the history of 
the Army of the Potomac that will cover General McClellan 
with gl^ry, and smite certain civil and military officials with 



112 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

the blackest infamy. This chapter caDnot now be written. It 
is sufficient at present to say that Halleck and Buell will not 
be wanting when the time comes to do that justice to McClel- 
lan for the part he took in procuring the victories of Fort 
Donelson and Fort Henry, BowHng Green and Island No. 10, 
which has so honorably distinguished General Burnside in his 
recent report to the War Department." 

The report of General Burnside here referred to is his re- 
port of the operations in North CaroHna. These operations 
had been planned and suggested by General McClellan early 
in September, 1861, he being then in command simply of the 
Army of the Potomac, but being constantly called upon by 
the government for advice in regard to the whole scope of 
our military operations. When in November, 1861, General 
McClellan was formally appointed to the chief command of 
the armies of the Union, his plan for these operations under- 
went of course some very important modifications ; and his 
own account of the whole matter may well be inserted here. 

THE NORTH CAROLINA EXPEDITION. 

The records of the War Department show my anxiety and 
efforts to assume active offensive operations in the fall and 
early winter. It is only just to say, however, that the unpre- 
cedented condition of the roads and Virginia soil would have 
delayed an advance till February had the discipline, organiza- 
tion and equipment of the army been as complete at the close 
of the tail as was necessary, and as I desired and labored, 
against every impediment, to make them. While still in com- 
mand only of the Army of the Potomac, namely, in early 
September, I proposed the formation of a corps of New Eng- 
land ers for coast service in the bays and inlets of the Chesa- 
peake and Potomac, to co-operate with my own command, 
from which most of its material was drawn. 

On the 1st of November, however, I was called to relieve 
Lieutenant-General Scott in the chief and general command 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 113 

of the armies of the Union. The direction and nature of this 
coast expedition, therefore, were somewhat changed, as will 
soon appear in the original plan submitted to the secretary of 
war, and the letter of instructions later issued to General 
Burnside, its commander. The whole country indeed had now 
become the theatre of military operations from the Potomac 
to and beyond the Mississippi, and to assist the navy in per- 
fecting and sustaining the blockade, it became necesssry to 
extend those operations to points on the sea^coast, Roanoke 
Island, Savannah and New Orleans. It remained also to equip 
and organize the armies of the West, whose condition was 
little better than that of the Army of the Potomac had been. 

The direction of the campaigns in the West, and of the op- 
erations upon the seaboard, enabled me to enter upon larger 
combinations, and to accomplish results the necessity and ad- 
vantage of which had not been imforeseen, but which had 
been beyond the ability of the single army formerly under 
my command to effect. 

The following letters and a subsequent paper to the Secre- 
tary of War sufficiently indicate the nature of those combina- 
tions to minds accustomed to reason upon military operations. 

Headquabters Ahmt op the Potomac, 
Washington, Sept. 6, 1861. 
Hon. Simon Cameron, Secretary of War : 

Sir : I have the honor to suggest the following proposition, 
with the request that the necessary authority be at once given 
me to carry it out : To organize a force of two brigades of 
five regiments each of New England men, for the general ser- 
vice — but particularly adapted to coast service. The officers 
and men to be sufficiently conversant with boat service to 
manage, steamers, sailing vessels, launches, barges, surf boats, 
floating batteries, &c. To charter or buy for the command 3 
sufficient number of propellers or tug-boats for transportation 
of men and supplies, the machinery of which should be amply 
protected by timber : the vessels to have permanent experi- 



114 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

enced officers from the merchant service, but to be manned 
by details from the command. A naval officer to be at- 
tached to the staff of the commanding officer. The flank 
companies of each regiment to be armed with Dahlgren boat 
guns, and carbines with water-proof cartridges ; the other 
companies to have such arms as I may hereafter designate, to 
be uniformed and equipped as the Rhode Island regiments 
are. Launches and floating batteries, with timber parapets 
of sufficient capacity to land or bring into action the entire 
force. 

The entire management and organization of the force to be 
under my control, and to form an integral part of the Army 
of the Potomac. 

The immediate object of this force is for operations in the 
inlets of Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac : by enabling me 
thus to land troops at points where they are needed, this force 
can also be used in conjunction with a naval force operating 
against points on the sea-coast. This coast division to be 
commanded by a general officer of nty selection. The regi- 
ments to be organized as other land forces. The disburse- 
ments for vessels, &c., to be made by the proper department 
of the army, upon the requisitions of the general commanding 
the division, with my approval. 

I think the entire force can be organized in thirty days, and 
by no means the least of the advantages of this proposition is 
the fact, that it will call into the service a class of men who 
would not otherwise enter the army. 

You will immediately perceive that the object of this force 
is to follow along the coast, and up the inlets and rivers, the 
movements of the main army when it advances. 

I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant, 

G. B. McClellan, Maj.-Gen. Comdg. 

Owing chiefly to the difficulty in procuring the requsite ves- 
sels, and adapting them to the special purposes contemplated. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOBGB B. McCLEIXAN. 116 

this expedition was not ready for service nntil January, 
1862. 

When in the chief command I deemed it best to send it to 
North Carolina with the design indicated in the following 
letter : 

Headquarters op the Army, 

Washington, January 7, 1862. 
Brig.-Gen. A. E. Burnside, Commanding Expedition : 

General : In accordance with verbal instructions hereto- 
fore given you — you will, after uniting with flag-officer Golds- 
borough, at Fort Monroe, proceed under his convey to Hat- 
teras Inlet, where you will in connection with him, take the 
most prompt measures for crossing the fleet over the bulkhead 
into the waters of the sound. Under the accompanying gene- 
ral order constituting the Department of IS'orth Carolina, you 
will assume command of the garrison at Hatteras Inlet, and 
make such dispositions in regard to that place, as your ulterior 
operations may render necessary — always being careful to pro- 
vide for the safety of that very important station in any con- 
tingency. 

Your first point of attack will be Roanoke Island and its 
dependencies. 

It is presumed that the navy can reduce the batteries on the 
marshes, and cover the landing of your troops on the main 
island, by which, in connection with a rapid movement of the 
gunboats to the northern extremity-r-as soon as the marsh 
battery is reduced — it may be hoped to capture the entire 
garrison of the place. Having occupied the island and its de- 
pendencies, you will at once proceed to the erection of the 
batteries and defences necessary to hold the position with a 
small force. Should the flag-officer require any assistance in 
seizing or holding the debouches of the canal from Norfolk — 
you will please afford it to him. 

The commodore and yourself having completed your ar- 
rangements in regard to Roanoke Island, and the waters north 



116 LIFE OP GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

of it, you will please at once make a descent on ISTewbern ; 
having gained possession of which, and the railroad passing 
through it, you will at once throw a sufficient force upon 
Beaufort, and take the steps necessary to reduce Fort Macon, 
and open that port. When you seize Newbern, you will en- 
deavor to seize the railroad as far west as Goldsborough — 
should circumstances favor such a movement. The temper of ' 
the people, the rebel force at hand, &c., will go far towards 
determining the question as to how far west the railroad can 
be occupied and held. Should circumstances render it advisa- 
ble to seize and hold Raleigh — the main north and south line 
of railroad passing through Goldsborough, should be so effect- 
ually destroyed for considerable distances north and south of 
that point, as to render it impossible for the rebels to use it to 
your disadvantage. ' A great point would be gained in any 
event, by the effectual destruction of the Wilmington and Wel- 
don Railroad. 

I would advise great caution in moving so far into the inte- 
rior as upon Raleigh. Having accomplished the objects men- 
tioned — ^the next point of interest would probably be Wil- 
mington, the reduction of which may require that additional 
means shall be afforded you. I would urge great caution in 
regard to proclamations. In no case would I go beyond a 
moderate joint proclamation with the naval commander, which 
should say as little as possible about politics or the negro, 
merely state that the true issue for which we are fighting is 
the preservation of the Union, and upholding the laws of the 
general government, and stating that all who conduct them- 
selves properly, will, as far as possible, be protected in their 
persons and property. 

You will please report your operations as often as an oppor- 
tunity offers itself. 

With my best wishes for your success, 

I am, &c., &G., G. B. McClellan, 

Major-Gen eral Commanding in Chief. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 117 

It will be observed that in bis instructions as commander- 
in-chief issued to General Burnside for the conduct of this ex- 
pedition, General McClellan dwells upon the occupation and 
destruction of the Weldon Railroad, at which General Grant 
has now for months been assiduously laboring, as a chief object 
to be aimed at. 

When the expedition was actually in the field, General Mc- 
Clellan had ceased to be commander-in-chief; and Mr. Lin- 
coln, who had then assumed the duties of that office, thought 
proper to divert the North Carolina expedition to the some- 
what different object of organizing a provisional State govern- 
ment somewhere on the coast of that commonwealth. 

The consistency of the principles upon which General Mc- 
Clellan instructed General Burnside to base his political course 
in an invaded country with those upon which General McClel- 
lan himself had so successfully acted in Western Virginia, will 
be remarked. This consistency was plainly a matter of mili- 
tary sagacity and common sense, quite as much as of political 
conviction ; and it is not very flattering to the intelligence of 
the American people that a large and active political party 
should seize upon such instructions as these as " a means of con- 
vincing them that General McClellan secretly sympathized " 
with " slavery and with the South" from the first. 

Immediately upon his arrival in Washington, General Mc- 
Clellan had been requested by the President to prepare a gen- 
eral view of the prospects of the war, together with such 
suggestions as he might think proper to make in respect to 
the way in which it ought to be prosecuted. The following 
memorandum was handed in by the General, in obedience to 
this request, on the 4th of August, 1861. 

" The object of the present war differs from those in which 
nations are usually engaged, mainly in this : That the purpose 
of ordinary war is to conquer a peace, and make a treaty on 
advantageous terms. In this contest it has become necessary 
to crush a population sufficiently numerous, intelligent, and 



118 LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 

warlike to constitute a nation. We have not only to defeat 
their armed and organized forces in the field, but to display- 
such an overwhelming strength as will convince all our antag- 
onists, especially those of the governing, aristocratic class, of 
the utter impossibility of resistance. Our late reverses make 
this course imperative. Had we been successful in the recent 
battle, (Manassas,) it is possible that we might have been 
spared the labor and expense of a great effort ; now we have 
no alternative. Their success will enable the political leaders 
of the rebels to convince the mass of their people that we are 
inferior to them in force and courage, and to command all 
their resources. The contest began with a class ; now it is 
with a people, our military success can alone restore the for- 
mer issue. 

" By thoroughly defeating their armies, taking their strong 
places, and pursuing a rigidly protective policy as to private 
property, and unarmed persons, and a lenient course as to pri- 
vate soldiers, we may well hope for a permanent restoration 
of a peaceful Union, But, in the first instance, the authority 
of the government must be supported by overwhelming physi- 
cal force. 

" Our foreign relations and financial credit also imperatively 
demand that the military action of the government should 
be prompt and irresistible. 

" The rebels have chosen Virginia as their battle-field, and 
it seems proper for us to make the first great struggle there. 
But while thus directing our main efforts, it is necessary to 
diminish the resistance there offered us, by movements on 
other points, both by land and water. 

" Without entering at present into details, I would advise 
that a strong raovenent be made on the Mississippi, and that 
the rebels be driven out of Missouri. 

" As soon as it becomes perfectly clear that Kentucky is 
cordially united with us, I would advise a movement through 
that State into Eastern Tennessee, for the purpose of assisting 



LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 119 

the Union men of that region, and of seizing the railroads 
leading from Memphis to the east. 

*' The possession of those roads by us, in connection with 
the movement on the Mississippi, would go far towards deter- 
mining the evacuation of Virginia by the rebels. In the 
meantime all the passes into Western Virginia, from the east, 
should be securely guarded ; but I would advise no movement 
from that quarter toward Richmond, unless the political con- 
dition of Kentucky renders it impossible, or inexpedient for 
us to make the movement upon Eastern Tennessee, through 
that State. Every effort, should, however, be made to organ- 
ize, equip, and arm as many troops as possible in Western 
Virginia, in order to render the Ohio and Indiana regiments 
a\^ilable for other operations. At as early a day as practica- 
ble, it would be well to protect and re-open the Baltimore and 
Ohio Railroad. 

" Baltimore and Fort Monroe should be occupied by garri- 
sons sufficient to retain them in our possession. The impor- 
tance of Harper's Ferry and the line of the Potomac, in the 
direction of Leesburg, will be very materially diminished so 
soon as our force in this vicinity becomes organized, strong 
and efficient, because no capable general will cross the river, 
north of this city, when we have a strong army here, ready to 
cut off his retreat. 

" To revert to the West ; it is probable that no very large 
additions to the troops now in Missouri, will be necessary to 
secure that State. 

" I presume that the force required for the movement down 
the Mississippi will be determined by its commander and the 
President. If Kentucky assumes the right position, not more 
than 20,000 troops will be needed, together with those that 
can be raised in that State and Eastern Tennessee, to secure 
the latter region and its railroads, as well as ultimately to oc- 
cupy Nashville. 

" The Western Virginia troops, with not more than 5,000 to 



120 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. MoCLELLAN. 

10,000 from Ohio and Indiana, should, under proper manage- 
ment, suffice for its protection. When we have reorganized 
our main army here, 10,000 men ought to be enough to pro- 
tect the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the Potomac. Five 
thousand will garrison Baltimore, 3,000 Fort Monroe, and not 
more than 20,000 will be necessary, at the utmost, for the de- 
fense of Washington. 

*' For the main army of operations, I urge the following 
composition : 

350 Eegiments of infantry, say .... 235,000 men 

100 Field Batteries, 600 guns 15,000 " 

28 Eegiments Cavalry 25,500 " 

5 " Engineer troops .... 7,500 " 

Total 273,000 

" The force must be supplied with the necessary engineer 
and pontoon trains, and with transportation for everything 
save tents. Its general line of operations should be so directed 
that water transportation can be availed of from point to point 
by means of the ocean and the rivers emptying into it. An 
essential feature of the plan of operations will be the employ- 
ment of a strong naval force, to protect the movements of a 
fleet of transports intended to convey a considerable body of 
troops from point to point of the enemy's sea-coast: thus 
either creating diversions, and rendering it necessary to de- 
tach largely from their main body, in order to protect such of 
their cities as may be threatened, or else landing and forming 
establishments on their coast at any favorable places that op- 
portunity might offer. This naval force should also co-operate 
with the main army, in its efforts to seize the important sea- 
board towns of the rebels. 

" It cannot be ignored that the construction of railroads has 
introduced a new and very important element into war, by the 
great facilities thus given for concentrating at particular posi- 
tions, large masses of troops from remote sections, and by 
creating now strategic points and lines of operations. It is 



LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 121 

intended to overcome this difficulty by the partial operations 
suggested, and such others as the particular case may require. 
We must endeavor to seize places on the railways, in the rear 
of the enemy's points of concentration, and we must threaten 
their seaboard cities, in order that each State may be forced, 
by the necessity of its own defence, to diminish its contingent 
to the Confederate army. 

" The proposed movement down the Mississippi will produce 
important results in this connection. That advance, and the 
progress of the main army at the East, will materially assist 
each other by diminishing the resistance to be encountered by 
each. The tendency of the Mississippi movement upon all 
questions connected with cotton is too w^ell understood by the 
president and cabinet to need any illustration from me. There 
is another independent movement which has often been sug- 
gested, and which has always recommended itself to my judg- 
ment. I refer to a movement from Kansas and Nebraska, 
through the Indian Territory upon Red River and Western 
Texas, for the purpose of protecting and developing the latent 
Union and free State sentiment, well known to predominate in 
Western Texas, and which, like a similar sentiment in Western 
Virginia, will, if protected, ultimately organize that section 
into a free State. How far it will be possible to support this 
movement by an advance through New Mexico from Califor- 
nia, is a matter which I have not sufficiently examined to be 
able to express a decided opinion. If at all practicable, it is 
eminently desirable, as bringing into play the resources and 
warlike qualities of the Pacific States, as well as identifying 
them with our cause, and cementing the bond of Union be- 
tween them and the general government. 

" If it is not departing too far from my province, I will ven- 
ture to suggest the policy of an intimate alliance and cordial 
understanding with Mexico; their sympathies and interests 
are with us ; their antipathies exclusively against our enemies 
and their institutions. I think it would not be difficult to ob- 



122 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

tain from the Mexican government the right to use, at least 
during the present contest, the road from Guaymas to New 
Mexico. This concession would very materially reduce the 
obstacles of, the column moving from the Pacific. A similar 
permission to use their territory for the passage of troops be- 
tween the Panuco and the Rio Grande, would enable us to 
throw a column of troops, by a good road from Tampico, or 
some of the small harbors north of it, upon and across the 
Rio Grande, without risk, and scarcely firing a shot. To what 
extent, if any, it would be desirable to take into service and 
employ Mexican soldiers, is a question entirely political, on 
which I do not venture to offer an opinion. 

" The force I have recommended is large, the expense is great. 
It is possible that a smaller force might accomplish the object 
in view ; but I understand it to be the purpose of this great 
nation to re-establish the power of its government, and to 
restore peace to its citizens, in the shortest possible time. The 
question to be decided is simply this : shall we crush the rebel 
lion at one blow, terminate the war in one campaign, or shall 
we leave it for a legacy to our descendants ? 

*' When the extent of the possible line of operations is con- 
sidered, the force asked for the main army under my com- 
mand cannot be regarded as unduly large. Every mile we 
advance carries us farther from our base of operations, and 
renders detachments necessary to cover our communications, 
while the enemy will be constantly concentrating as he falls 
back. I propose with the force which I have requested, not 
only to drive the enemy out of Virginia and occupy Rich- 
mond, but to occupy Charleston, Savannah, Montgomery, 
Pensacola, Mobile and New Orleans; in other words, to move 
into the heart of the enemy's country, and crush out the re- 
bellion in its very heart. 

" By seizing and repairing the railroads as we advance, the 
difficulties of transportation will be materially diminished. It 
is perhaps unnecessary to state, that in addition to the forces 



LIFE OP GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAIf. 123 

named in this memorandum, strong reserves should be formed, 
ready to supply any losses that may occur. 

In conclusion, I would submit that the exigencies of the 
treasury may be lessened by making only partial payments to 
our troops, when in the enemy's country, and by giving the 
obligation of the United States for such supphes as may there 
be obtained. 

Geo. B. McClellan, Major- General. 

Upon this memorandum General McClellan remarks in his 
report : 

" I do not think the events of the war have proved these 
views, upon the methods and plans of its conduct, altogether 
incorrect. They certainly have not proved my estimate of the 
number of troops and scope of operations too large. It is 
probable that I did under-estimate the time necessary for the 
completion of arms and equipments. It was not strange, 
however, that by many civilians intrusted with authority there 
should have been an exactly opposite opinion held in both 
these particulars." 

The President was so much impressed with the propriety 
and practical force of the views set forth in this memorandum, 
that he urged General McClellan to address a letter embody- 
ing its substance to Lieutenant-General Scott, whose own plans 
for the next campaign, as we have seen, had been frequently 
submitted by him to discussion at cabinet meetings, in the 
presence of General McClellan's predecessor in the command 
of the Department of the Potomac. 

Lieutenant-General Scott took umbrage at the submission to 
him by letter of views which he expressed himself as perfectly 
ready to " entertain and discuss," if " presented by General 
McClellan in person ;" and he accordingly addressed a note on 
the subject to the secretary of war, in which he declared, 
that feeling himself " to be an incumbrance to the army as 
well as to himself," he must ask to be placed on the retired Hst. 



124 LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 

Shocked at the idea that he could be supposed capable of 
wantonly or carelessly wounding the sensibilities of the vene- 
rable head of the army, General McClellan on learning what 
had happened, at once addressed the following letter to the 
President : 

WASHrnGtoN, Aug. 10, 1861. 

The letter addressed by me under date of the 8th inst. to 
Lieutenant-General Scott, commanding the United States 
army, was designed to be a plain and respectful expression of 
my views of the measures demanded for the safety of the 
government in. the imminent peril that besets it at the present 
hour. Every moment's reflection and every fact transpiring, 
convinced me of the urgent necessity of the measures there 
indicated, and I felt it my duty to him and to the country to 
communicate them frankly. It is therefore with great pain 
that I have learned from you this morning, that my view^s do 
not meet with the approbation of the Lieutenant-General, and 
that my letter is unfavorably regarded by him. The command 
with which I am intrusted was not sought by me, and has only 
been accepted from an earnest and humble desire to serve my 
country in the moment of the most extreme peril. With 
these views I am willing to do and suffer whatever may be re- 
quired for that service. Nothing could be farther from my 
wishes than to seek any command or urge any measures not 
required for the exigency of the occasion, and above all, I 
would abstain from any conduct that could give offence to 
General Scott, or embarrass the President or any department 
of the government. 

Influenced by these considerations, I yield to your request 
and withdraw the letter referred to. The government and 
my superior officer being apprised of what I consider to be 
necessary and proper for the defence of the national capital, I 
shall strive faithfully and zealously to employ the means that 
may be placed in my power for that purpose, dismissing every 
personal feeling or consideration, and praying only the bless- 



LITE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 125 

ing of Divine Providence on my efforts. I will only add that 
as you requested my authority to withdraw the letter, that 
authority is hereby given, with the most profound assurance 
of my respect for General Scott and yourself. 

Very respectfully, your obedient servant, 

George B. McClellan. 

The President at once called upon General Scott to ask him 
to withdraw in his turn his letter to the secretary of war ; 
but this General Scott declined to do, on the ground as stated 
by himself that — 

"The original offence given me by General McClellan 
seems to have been the result of deliberation between him and 
some of the members of the cabinet, by whom all the greater 
war questions are to be settled without resort to or consulta- 
tion with me, the nominal general-in-chief of the army." 

The " freedom of access to and consultation with portions 
of the cabinet," enjoyed by the junior general, added Gene- 
ral Scott, " have very naturally deluded him into a feeling of 
indifference towards me." The veteran accordingly ended 
this unfortunate correspondence with a reiterated expression 
of his wish to retire from the service rather than risk undigni- 
fied collisions with a general so " supported," and, as he ad- 
ded, the justice of the soldier constraining him to the tribute, 
*' who besides possessed very high qualifications for command." 

General McClellan could not permit matters, however, so 
to rest ; and such was the force of his intrinsic honesty of 
feeling and purpose that this difficulty which, had it occurred 
with a man more vain, arrogant, or inconsiderate than himself, 
must have occasioned permanent pain and annoyance to a 
chieftain entitled to the reverence of all Americans, and might 
possibly have inflicted some serious damage on the cause of 
the Union, passed off quietly and honorably to both parties. 

It was not until the 1st of November that General Scott 
reiterated his application for leave to withdraw from active 



126 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. MoCLELLAN. 

service upon the single ground of his advanced years and his 
many infirmities. 

" With the retirement of General Scott," says Mr. Lincoln, 
in his first annual message to Congress, " came the executive 
duty of appointing in his stead a general-in-chief of the 
army. It is a fortunate ch'cumstance that neither in council 
nor country, was there, so far as I know, any difference of 
opinion as to the proper person to be selected. The retiring 
chief repeatedly expressed his judgment in favor of General 
McClellan for the position, and in this the nation seemed to 
give a unanimous concurrence. The designation of General 
McClellan is, therefore, in a considerable degree, the selection 
of the country as well as of the executive ; and hence there 
is better reason to hope there will be given him the confidence 
and cordial support thus^ hy fair implication promised^ and 
without which he cannot^ with as full efficiency^ serve the 
countryP 

Pregnant words ! upon which the conduct of the President 
himself was within a few short weeks to furnish a most painful 
and instructive commentary ! 

On taking the Command-in-Chief of the Armies of the 

Union, General McClellan issued a general order, in which, 

*., after paying a simple and noble tribute to the merits and the 

services of the "great soldier of our nation," he made this 

touching appeal to the army : 

" While we regret his loss, there is one thing we cannot re- 
gret, the bright example he has left for our emulation. Let us 
all hope and pray that his declining years may be passed in 
peace and happiness, and that they may be cheered by the suc- 
cess of the country and the cause he has fought for and has 
loved so well. Beyond all things, let us do nothing that can 
cause him to blush for us. Let no defeat of the army he has 
commanded embitter his last years, but let our victories illumi- 
nate the close of a life so grand." 

Swords were now voted to the young commander ; speeches 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 127 

were made to him ; he was compared in the newspapers to 
Napoleon the Great. A few words, spoken by him in reply 
to one of these many assaults upon his modesty and his man- 
hood, completely paint at once the man himself and the true 
duty of a people towards one whom they have elevated to 
such a position : 

" I ask in the future only forbearance, patience, and confi- 
dence. With these we can accomplish all." 



CHAPTER V. 

GElSHERAIi McCLELLAN AS C0MMA2a>ER-IN-CHIEF. CONSEQUENCES OP 
THE VICTORY OP MANASSAS AT THE SOUTH. PREPARATIONS POR THE 
GENERA! ADVANCE OP THE ARMIES OP THE UNION IN THE SPRING. 
POPULAR IMPATIENCE. MR. LINCOLN SUPERSEDES GENERAL McCLEL- 
LAN AT THE END OP TWO MONTHS. 

It is essential not merely to a just comprehension of the 
true responsibility of General McClellan for the successes and 
failures which attended the effort to re-establish the Federal 
authority by force of arms while he remained in the active 
service of the Union ; but to a fair understanding of the course 
of events, that we should now briefly consider the way in w^hich 
miUtary affairs had been administered at Washington during 
the interval between the nomination of General McClellan to 
the command of the Army of the Potomac, and the retirement 
of General Scott. 

During these three months the new army of the Union had 
been organizing ; the defenses of "Washington had been con- 
structing ; and the general character of the military work 
done had been such as to offer httle temptation to mere ama- 
teurs. It is only when a fine army stands ready at hand to 
execute itself and their will that the inspired and uninstructed 
masters of the art of war take a real pleasure in the exercise 
of their genius. For the most part, therefore, the military af- 
fairs of the United States were directed during the months of 
August, September and October, 1861, by military men, Lieu- 
tenant-Gen eral Scott being nominally at the head of the army. 

By the 15th of October the total force of troops in and 
about Washington, including the garrisons of Alexandria and 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 129 

Baltimore, had been raised to 152,051 men. As these troops 
had gradually been gathered in from all parts of the country, 
they had been organized into brigades of four regiments each, 
and after this organization had been well established into divi- 
sions of three brigades each. The organization of the artillery 
and cavalry necessarily went on more slowly and needed to be 
still more carefully prosecuted than the organization of the in- 
fantry. 

As week after week passed by with no decisive demonstra- 
tions either on the part of the enemy or on that of the army 
of the Union, the civilians at headquarters who were impatient 
of results, and from whose minds the severe lesson of Bull Run 
was gradually fading put, had begun first to wonder and then 
to murmur at what they regarded as the "inaction" of the 
forces. They saw the steady increase in the number of the 
defenders of the nation, and gliding easily into the error of 
confounding fullness of the ranks with fitness for service, they 
gradually fell into their old way of planning brilliant cam- 
paigns and demanding decisive measures. 

What the educated and competent officers of the army itself 
thought of this temper growing up around them, and what 
their judgment was as to the efficiency of the army at this 
time, was well expressed by General McCall, of Pennsylvania, 
an officer who afterwards highly distinguished himself in the 
campaign of the Peninsula. 

General McCall was examined by the Congressional commit- 
tee on the conduct of the war on the 28th of December, 1861, 
in reference to the affair of Ball's Bluff, which took place 
October 21st, and of which we shall presently have occasion 
again to speak. 

In the course of his examination Senator Chandler, of Mich- 
igan, a legislator of unusually warlike tastes and fancy, who 
seems to have made up his mind that General McClellan had 
missed a noble opportunity for annihilating General Johnston 
by massing his own troops, and compelling the enemy to do 



130 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

as mucli at Leesburg, a point which neither general had con- 
sidered important enough to occupy in force, put the following 
questions to General McCall, and received from him the fol. 
lowing answers : 

The Senator. Suppose you had been ordered up, Smith's 
division had been ordered up, and other divisions next to them 
had been ordered up along there, Stone's division had been 
ordered over, and Banks' division ordered over also, so as to 
be able to meet any force they could have brought from Man- 
assas or Centreville into the open field, would not that have 
been a good time to have done it ? 

The General. ISTo, sir. 

The Senator. If they had failed to come out then, you 
would have cut their left wing up entirely ? 

The General. That would have brought on the general bat- 
tle of the campaign, and McClellan was not ready to fight that 
battle at that time. 

The Senator. Why not ? 

The General. He had not the force. His men were not. 
disciplined, as they were new. It would have been, I con- 
sider, a very imprudent thing. And I have not the smallest 
doubt that McClellan saw that at onoe, and he knew that if an 
affair of one or two brigades took place there, the probability 
was that it would have brought on the general battle of the 
campaign, and terminated, perhaps, the campaign. He was 
not prepared for it, and did not want to fight there. I am al- 
most certain of that, judging from my knowledge of the man, 
and from what I think I should have done myself under the 
circumstances.* 

* I cannot refrain from inserting here an exquisitely characteristic pas- 
sage from the close of this examination of General McCall by Mr. Chan- 
dler, a passage which would be as amusing as it is characteristic had 
not the interference of such persons as Mr. Chandler with the civil and 
military policy of the nation entailed so much misery upon us. Utterly 
dissatisfied with the General's replies to his military inquiries, the mor- 
tified senator suddenly turns upon him thus : 



LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 131 

This disastrous affair of Ball's Bluff had occurred, as we 
have seen, but a few days before President Lincoln conferred 
the supreme command of the forces upon General McClellan. 
Of course the President cannot possibly have considered Gen- 
eral McClellan to have been in any way responsible for the 
mishap ; and the circumstances which attended it ought to 
have impressed his excellency's mind anew with the truth of 
his own maxim, that " one bad general is better than two good 
ones." 

In the beginning of the month of October General McClel- 
lan had found reason to believe that the enemy were prepar- 
ing to evacuate their positions at and about Manassas Plains. 
"Watching the whole field of operations with an instructed and 
intelligent eye, he had not failed to perceive that the victory 
of July 21st, while it had given prestige and spirit to the army 
of the Confederates actually in their service, had indisposed 
the Southern people in general to making any particular ef- 
forts to increase their army or to strengthen the hands of their 
government. They had been lapped by the successes of that 
day into a condition of careless self-confidence, which must 
have proved eminently advantageous to the cause of the 
Union if the renewal of active hostilities could have been post- 
poned by the army of the Union until it had become strong 
enough to take the offensive at one and the same time against 
all the great points of Southern resistance. Little had been done 
towards adequately fortifying the Southern seaports, or ade- 
quately constituting the Southern armies foj* the defence of the 
vast extent of territory which the Confederates had undertaken 
to hold. Neither the war minister nor the naval minister of 



The Senator. What disposition are you now making of the eontrdbands 
that come into your lines ? 

The General. I liave been ordered to receive all that come in and 
send them to Washington. 

The Senator. You do not send them back to their owners ? 

The General. No, sir I 



132 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

Jefferson Davis commanded the confidence of the Southern 
l^eople, and neither had done or seemed disposed to do any- 
thing to deserve confidence. The Confederacy was soon to be 
recognized by a world famishing for the lack of cotton ; and 
close upon that auspicious moment must come peace with all 
her blessings. 

In his report on the surrender of New Orleans the Confed- 
erate General Mansfield Lovell states that upon assuming 
command of his department he had applied in vain for guns of 
heavy calibre to be mounted for the defence of the city, but 
could obtain none, " the general impression being that New 
Orleans would not be attacked by the river ;" nor was he able 
during the whole of the fall and winter months of 1861-62 to 
procure effective small-arms for arming more than twelve hun- 
dred men when the crisis came in the fate of the commercial 
metropolis of the South. The same languor hung upon the 
naval preparations for holding the lower Mississippi. 

The coast defences of South Carolina and Georgia were con- 
fided by the Confederate government to a certain General 
Gonzalez, an adventurer of Cuban and Kicaraguan notoriety, 
who came to Richmond and reported Hilton Head " impreg- 
nable," about a fortnight before that place surrendered to the 
Union fleet. 

When General Albert Sidney Johnston was ordered to the 
command of the Confederates in the West he found but about 
fifteen thousand men at Bowling Green, the " western Manas- 
sas," as it was called, nor could he obtain any attention to his 
repeated representations of the precarious condition of the 
rebel cause in the great central region of the "Tennessee and 
the Cumberland till the thunder of the Union guns began to 
speak more loudly than his letters and dispatches. 

This being the general state of military affairs at the South 
while General McClellan was organizing the national armies 
and preparing them for decisive action, General Joseph John- 
ston's force at Manassas was kept well in hand to fall back 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 133 

upon and cover Richmond at the first intimation of a new Fed- 
eral movement for its capture. It was doubted at Richmond 
whether any such movement would be made at all, but it was 
not at all doubted that if made, and made under a competent 
commander, it would be made either by the way of the Shen- 
andoah valley, the lower Rappahannock, or the James and 
York Rivers. 

The value of the Confederate positions at Manassas as a base 
of offensive operations against Washington had passed away 
with the foregone opportunity of July, and the Southern army 
at that point had suffered too much from disease and from de- 
fective organization during the months of August and Septem- 
ber to assume the offensive and attempt to create a new oppor- 
tunity of the same kind. 

In the improbable contingency that General McClellan 
should suffer himself to be hurried by non-military influences 
into making the lamentable blunder of an advance against 
Manassas, General Johnston had accordingly prepared himself 
to retreat at once towards his true base at Richmond. 

Nothing of this was commonly understood at the North, 
where the continued presence of Johnston at Manassas was 
perpetually denounced as an insult, a menace, and a peril to 
Washington and to the Union ; and President Lincoln began 
again to be besieged with entreaties, more or less imperious, to 
command a direct movement upon the enemy. 

On the 19th of October General McClellan, clearly conceiv- 
ing the true state of the case, ordered General McCall to cover 
a grand reconnoissance in force to be made the next day from 
Drainesville. This reconnoissance was successfully made ; and 
on the next day, October 20th, General Stone, occupying 
Poolesville in Maryland, was ordered to make a feint of cross- 
ing the Potomac in order to feel the enemy at Leesburg, in 
Virginia, which place the enemy had held in no great force, 
and which General McClellan believed them to be, as they in 
fact were, on the point of abandoning. This feint was made ; 



134 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

but in making it General Stone employed an officer whose 
direct personal relations with the President, and whose official 
rank as a senator of the United States, seems to have misled 
him into adventuring further than it was expected or intended 
he should go; and the events of next day, October 21st, con- 
verted the simple reconnoissance of Edwards' Ferry into the 
disastrous battle of Ball's Bluff, a battle fought certainly with- 
out the knowledge or the orders of the commanding general, 
fought where there was no direct military purpose to be gained 
even by a victory, and fought with so little skill and judgment 
that it resulted in the complete and humiliating defeat of our 
troops by a body of the enemy largely inferior in point of num- 
bers and of artillery. 

All that could possibly have been won by a successful issue 
of this unhappy movement would have been a stimulation of 
the public appetite for " brilliant and exciting intelligence" and 
a powerful reinforcement of the rapidly increasing Aulic Coun- 
cil of military civilians by whom the government was now 
again surrounded and the commanding general beset. 

Its failure confirmed the exulting confidence of the Southern 
troops in their own invincibility, and cast another shade of 
gloom over the banners which the defeat of Bull Run had 
already clouded. 

Good might, however, have come out of this evil had the 
President but read in it a fresh lesson of the absolute necessity 
of trusting the control of the armies implicitly to their nominal 
commander and of abstaining himself, and causing others to 
abstain, from ignorant and impatient interference with opera- 
tions which imperatively demanded time for their ripening and 
unity of authority for their successful execution. 

Immediately upon taking command of the armies of the 
Union, General McClellan addressed letters of instruction to 
Generals Halleck, Buell, Sherman and Butler, commanding re- 
spectively the departments of Missouri and Ohio, and the ex- 
peditions of the South Atlantic and the Gulf. In these letters 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 135 

the whole field before the army as we shall see was surveyed 
with masterly judgment, and the special part to be taken in 
those operations by each commander sketched, oat for him, 
with clearness and with precision, and, as subsequent events 
have proved, with an almost marvellous sagacity. The restora- 
tion of public confidence in Missouri by a thorough reform in 
the military administration of that State, and by the chastise- 
ment of ofiicial corruption : the conciliation of the well-disposed 
population of Kentucky by a "religious respect for the rights 
of all :" the prompt and decisive occupation of Knoxville and 
East Tennessee — cutting off all communication between Vir- 
ginia and the Mississippi; the reduction of Fort Pulaski on 
the Savannah River, and the organization of a formidable 
attack upon Charleston. These were the principal measures 
which General McClellan proposed to himself as the constitu- 
ent points of his grand campaign for the reduction of the 
seceded States to their allegiance to the Union. 

Had these measures been carried into effect simultaneously 
in the spring of 1862, under the untrammelled supervision of 
a single military mind, and with forces adequate, as well in 
point of preparation as in point of numbers, to the work, it is 
difficult to resist the conviction that they must have resulted 
in the complete prostration of the organized force of the Con- 
federate States. 

As we have already seen, such was the condition of the 
Confederate armies at the time when General McClellan was 
maturing his plans, that the premature, hastily prepared, and 
somewhat hurriedly executed movements which, in February 
and March, were made in the West under the direct authority 
of President Lincoln, sufficed to make an impression upon the 
front of Confederate resistance in that quarter, which, had it 
been accompanied by an equal impact upon the eastern and 
southern bulwarks of the then loosely jointed Confederate sys- 
tem, could hardly have failed to determine a speedy issue of 
the war. Won as they were, these isolated and premature 



136 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

triumphs in the West simply aroused the Confederates to a 
full sense of their danger. The great scheme of the war was 
broken up by them, and the nation expiated in more than a 
year of desperate and costly efforts to master the Mississippi, 
and open a way into Eastern Tennessee, the impatience which 
refused to recognize the infinite advantages of the delay 
which perfects concentration, over the desultory and incoher- 
ent energy which spends itself in ill-combined blows and in 
spasmodic effort. 

The period during which General McClellan really held 
command of the armies of the Union, and was really in a posi- 
tion to enable him to plan and prepare a campaign propor- 
tionate to the area of the war, extended over but a little more 
than two months. He was called, as we have seen, to fill the 
post vacated by Lieutenant-General Scott in November, 1861. 
Incessantly occupied with the details of the organization of 
the main army, which was to be directly commanded by him- 
self. General McClellan was at the same time burdened with 
the duty of supervising all the military preparations of the 
Union, and of elaborating the vast plan of campaign already 
sketched. 

It is not surprising that while sparing neither body nor 
brain in this colossal task, the young commander-in-chief 
should have overtaxed even his vigorous constitution. To- 
wards the middle of December he contracted a serious illness, 
which for a short time confined him to his headquarters at 
Washington. 

During this time the political pressure upon the President 
for an advance of the armies became daily more and more 
vehement. The secretary of war, Mr. Cameron, left the 
cabinet, and was succeeded by Mr. Stanton, who, while he 
professed the warmest regard for the young general in com- 
mand of the armies, gave his most strenuous efforts in support 
of the external clamor which was driving the President to- 



LIFE 6f gen. GEOEGE B, McCLELLAK. 137 

ward a practical nullification of his influence and his au- 
thority. 

Before General McClellan had fully recovered his health, 
and without any consultation whatever had with him, the 
President finally, on the 27th of January, 1862, succumbed to 
these demoralizing forces, and assumed himself the command 
of the national forces. 

On that day he issued from the Executive Mansion the fol- 
lowing War Order : 

" Ordered^ That the twenty-second day of February, 1862, 
be the day for a general movement of the land and naval 
forces of the United States against the insurgent forces. 
That especially the army at and about Fortress Monroe, the 
army of the Potomac, the army of Western Virginia, the 
army near Mumfordsville, Kentucky, the army and flotilla at 
Cairo, and a naval force in the Gulf of Mexico, be ready to 
move on that day. 

*' That all other forces, both land and naval, with their re- 
spective commanders, obey existing orders for the time, and 
be ready to obey additional orders when duly given. 

"That the heads of departments, and especially the secre- 
taries of war and of the navy, with all their subordinates, 
and the general-in-chief, with all other commanders and sub- 
ordinates of land and naval forces, will severally be held to 
to their strict and full responsibilities for prompt execution of 
this order. Abraham Lincoln." 

From the moment of the promulgation of this most extra- 
ordinary order, the general, whom it so peremptorily and so 
insultingly superseded, ceased of course to be responsible for 
the conduct of any military operations not carried on directly 
under his own eyes, and specially committed to his own direct 
control. 

It is necessary to remember here that the armies thus 
directed to be set in motion upon a given day, which was 



138 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

thus publicly announced to foes and friends alike, were made 
up of many thousands of men entirely unfamiliar with war, 
and commanded for the most part by officers as inexperienced 
as themselves. The few " veterans " of this host were men 
whose nominal service under arms had a date of but from four 
to five months. As to the condition of those great branches 
of the military service, on which the practicability of moving 
such a force must have been absolutely dependent, had the 
troops been troops of the line, inured to war, no one could 
possibly form an intelligent notion excepting the commanding 
general under whom they had been organized, but who was 
not so much as consulted upon the subject. 

Viewed in the light of these considerations this singular 
order would seem as unaccountable in itself as it is certainly 
unique in the history of human warfare, were not an adequate, 
if not a satisfactory, explanation of its origin and its intent fur- 
nished to us by one of the ablest and most intrepid defenders 
of Mr. Lincoln and of his administration. 

In his Life of President Lincoln, Mr. Raymond, of New 
York, thus simply and clearly states the case : 

" As winter approached without any indications of an in- 
tended movement of our armies, the public impatience rose to 
the highest point of discontent. The administration was 
everywhere held responsible for these unaccountable delays, 
and was freely charged by its opponents with a design to pro- 
tract the war for selfish political purposes of its own, and at 
the fall elections the public dissatisfaction made itself mani- 
fest by adverse votes in every considerable State where elections 
were held!''* 

From the moment when considerations of political and par- 
tisan expediency thus invaded the great question of the con- 
duct of the war in the mind of the President all harmonious 
concert of action between that functionary and General 
McClellan necessarily came to an end. With such considera- 
tions General McClellan, as an honest and single-minded sol- 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 139 

dier, laboring for the defeat of the armed enemies of the Union, 
had and could have nothing whatever to do. It is by no 
means foreign to the course of our narrative to observe that 
the "public dissatisfaction" which "made itself manifest by- 
adverse votes" in the fall elections of 1861 had its origin in 
many other causes besides the delays in the movement of our 
armies. The civil administration of the government had been 
conducted with an extraordinary recklessness alike of the laws 
of the land and of the liberties of the citizens, while the bare 
fact of the persistent existence of the civil war itself necessa- 
rily shook the public confidence in the statesmanship of a party 
whose leading representatives had openly laughed the possi- 
bility of such a war to scorn ; and the " premier" of whose 
elected President had repeatedly predicted the complete res- 
toration of order throughout the nation within " sixty days" 
from the passage of the ordinance of secession by the State of 
South Carolina. To concentrate this " public dissatisfaction" 
if possible upon the delays in the movement of our armies ; to 
brand these delays as " unaccountable ;" and to fix the respon- 
sibility of them upon the commander of the forces, was per- 
haps a clever move in partisan tactics. Clever or foolish, it 
seems to have tempted the administration into entire forgetful- 
ness of the fatal consequences which it must entail upon the 
public service and the welfare of the State. 

It would appear, loo, that a singular confidence in his own 
capacity as a military leader was at the same time growing up 
in the mind of the President. For, not content with assuming 
the general command, by proclamation, of the armies of the 
Union, Mr. Lincoln at once proceeded to assume the direct 
control of the campaign of the Army of the Potomac in partic- 
ular. '' 

On the 31st of January, 1862, appeared the President's Spe- 
cial War Order, No. 1, couched in the following terms: 



140 LITE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

"Executive Mansion, January 31, 1862. 
" Ordered^ That all the disposable force of the Army of the 
Potomac, after providing safely for the defence of Washington, 
be formed into an expedition for the immediate object of seiz- 
ing and occupying a point upon the railroad southwestward 
of what is known as Manassas Junction, all details to be in the 
discretion of the commander-in-chief, and the expedition to 
move on or before the twenty-second day of February next. 

"Abeaham Lincoln." 

Had the civil war been suddenly brought to an end by the 
submission of the South before a single movement had been 
made in the campaign of 1862 this " Special War Order, No. 1" 
might doubtless live in history simply as the most grotesque 
document which ever emanated from a man elevated by his 
fellow-men to a position of great trust and grave responsi- 
bility. 

The accredited biographer of Mr. Lincoln informs us that 
he distinguished himself in his early life by his bravery and 
skill in conducting the defence of a flatboat on the Mississippi 
River against an attack made upon it by seven negroes. The 
remembrance of the exploit does not seem to have impelled 
the president to relieve our naval commanders of the responsi- 
bilities of their profession ; and it is highly improbable that it 
would ever have occurred to the President, had he found him- 
self on board of the Monitor during her remarkable conflict 
with the Merrimac, to assume the command of that gallant lit- 
tle craft and prescribe mancEuvres of battle to Lieutenant 
Worden. Yet the brief land campaign against the Indians in 
which we are assured that Mr. Lincoln once took a creditable 
part as a captain of militia appears to have inspired him with 
the belief that he might reasonably and respectably undertake 
to handle one of the largest armies of modern times engaged 
in one of the most formidable and difficult invasions upon 
record. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 141 

General McClellan has many times in the course of his ca- 
reer exhibited a power of self-command, and a forgetfuluess 
of all merely personal considerations in behalf of his obligations 
to his country and to the troops under his command, which 
entitles him to a high place among those heroes who, like 
England's Iron Duke, have dared to feel that 

" The path of duty is the way to glory." 

But never surely were these qualities more keenly tested 
than they must have been by this " war order," which at once 
shocked his common sense as a soldier and outraged his self- 
respect as an officer high in command. 

Before this " order" was issued, General McClellan had ex- 
plained to the President the plan of campaign which he in- 
tended to pursue in Virginia. Like the immortal Dutch com- 
missioners who harassed the soul of Marlborough with their 
incessant interferences in his campaign, the President certainly 
had a right in virtue of his position to know what operations 
the general in command of his armies was about to undertake ; 
but like those high and mighty marplots also, his excellency 
committed the blunder of interpreting this right into a war- 
rant for assuming the control of those operations, objecting to 
them, and modifying all the conditions essential to their suc- 
cess. Had Mr. Lincoln consulted General Halleck on the sub- 
ject of these pretensions of his, that officer, who has done his 
country the service of translating Baron Jomini's great work 
on the art of war, might have enlightened him as to the limits 
of executive duty, with the following passage, upon which 
the campaign of 1862 on the Peninsula was destined to furnish 
a commentary more striking than any which the older history 
of warfare has bequeathed to us. 

" In my judgment," observes Baron Jomini, discussing the 
part taken by the Executive Aulic Council of Vienna in direct- 
ing the operations of the Austrian armies, " the only duty 
which such a council can safely undertake is that of advising 



142 LIFE OP GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

as to the adoption of a general plan of operations. Of course 
I do not mean by this a plan which is to embrace the whole 
course of a campaign, tie down the generals to that course, 
and so inevitably lead to their being beaten. I mean a plan 
which shall determine the objects of the campaign, decide 
whether offensive or defensive operations shall be undertaken, 
and fix the amount of material means which may be relied 
upon in the first instance for the opening of the enterprise, and 
then for the possible reserves in case of invasion. It cannot 
be denied that all these things may be, and even should be, dis- 
cussed in a council of government made up of generals and of 
ministers ; but here the action of such a council should stop ; 
for if it pretends to say to a commander-in-chief not only that 
he shall march on Vienna or on Paris, but also in what way he 
is to manoeuvre to reach those points, the unfortunate com- 
mander-in-chief will certainly be beaten, and the whole ee- 

SPONSIBILITY OF HIS KEVERSES WILL REST UPON THOSE WHO, 
TWO HUNDRED MILES OFF FROM THE ENEMY, PRETEND TO 
DIRECT AN ARMY WHICH IT IS DIFFICULT ENOUGH TO HANDLE 
WHEN ACTUALLY IN THE FIELD." 



CHAPTER VI. 

GENEEAL McCLELLAN AS CX)MMANDER-IN-CHIEF. HOLDS THAT POSITION 
FOB ABOUT TWO MONTHS. GENERAL PLAN OF CAMPAIGN AND POLI- 
TICS OF THE WAR. 

When General McClellan accepted the formal command of 
the armies of the Union on the 1st of ISTovember, 1861, of 
course he accepted that most responsible position with the 
understanding that he was to enjoy in the discharge of its du- 
ties *' the confidence and cordial support, thus by fair implica- 
tion promised, and without which he could not" (it is Presi- 
dent Lincoln, be it remembered, who speaks) " with so full 
efficiency serve the country." 

The meaning of the words " confidence" and " cordial sup- 
port," as we shall now see, must undergo a serious modifica- 
tion before either of these terms can be fitted to the treatment 
which General McClellan did actually receive from the execu- 
tive of the Union. 

From the moment when General McClellan was thus made 
responsible for the general progress of the war, the campaign 
of the Potomac necessarily ceased to be the exclusive subject 
of his care. The more extended power now conferred upon 
him authorized, and indeed required him, to devote himself to 
perfecting and developing, in a systematic plan of operations, 
those suggestions of movements to be made on many other 
points of the circle of hostilities, which he had before thrown 
out at the request of the President, and in a merely advisory 
way„ 

Still regarding the capture of Richmond, and the defeat of 



144 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAK. 

the main rebel army in Virginia, as the leading object to be 
aimed at, and determining to conduct in person that part of 
the operations he was about to direct, the new commander-in- 
chief undertook a complete review of the political and mili- 
tary elements of the problem before him. The results of this 
labor are fully presented in the letters of instructions which 
he addressed to the different generals by whom the different 
parts of the general scheme of operations upon which he had 
resolved were intended to be carried out. 

We give these letters in full, for a fair understanding of the 
whole history of the war subsequently to the first of Novem- 
ber, 1861, can only be obtained by a careful perusal of them. 

It will be observed that three of these letters bear date 
from the Yth to the 11th November, 1861, while the two 
others, and these not the least important, are dated on the 
14th and 23d of February, 1862, respectively. The instruc- 
tions comprised in them all belong to one system of action ; 
but it is of vital consequence for the reader to bear in mind 
that the position of the writer had become materially modified 
by circumstances, which will be fully considered in the prog- 
ress of this sketch, during the interval between the 12th of 
November, 1861, and the 14th of February, 1862. 

The operations of the armies in the departments of the Ohio 
and of Missouri, which are treated of in the letters written in 
November, 1861, and the operations of the armies on the South 
Atlantic and on the Gulf, which are treated of in the letters 
written in February, 1862, were intended to be actively begun 
at one and the same time, when the general plan of operations 
was drawn up by General McClellan in November, 1861. 
The position of affairs in the departments of the Ohio and of 
Missouri, however, was such, in the month of November, 
1861, the whole region embraced in those departments being 
then substantially under the control of our arms, that a judi- 
cious political administration of our military force was the 
imperative need of the moment there. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 145 

In the departments of the South Atlantic and the Gulf, on 
the contrary, we had our whole way still to make ; and it was 
altogether undesirable therefore, from a military point of view, 
that any important directions should be issued, or any impor- 
tant movements undertaken in that part of the scene of action, 
until the opening of the season for general and combined 
operations. 

Before the opening of that season came, General McClellan, 
as we have seen, had been virtually deprived of the authority 
necessary to the execution of his plans. On the 23d of Feb- 
ruary, 1862, he still retained indeed the nominal command of 
the armies of the Union, but he had been publicly notified, 
and the armies and the people of the Union with him, that he 
no longer enjoyed" the " confidence," and could no longer ex- 
pect the "cordial support," without which it was impossible 
for him to discharge the duties of command. 

The President, who had seen fit thus to violate his pledged 
faith to the commander-in-chief within less than three months 
from the day when it was given, proceeded to deal with the 
plan of operations adopted in November, 1861, according to 
his pleasure. 

In so far as concerns the politics of war, the principles of 
the plan laid down by General McClellan in his letters of in- 
struction were entirely abandoned by the President. General 
McClellan, in his memorandum presented to the President on 
the 4th of August, 1861, had recognized the new and danger- 
ous character likely to be impressed upon the war of secession 
by the results of the Confederate victory at Manassas. " The 
contest," he had then said, " began with a class, now it is with 
a people ; our military success alone can restore the former 
issue." In his letters of instruction to the commanders of 
departments he dwelt earnestly upon the importance of taking 
all possible pains to prevent the complete and permanent im- 
pression of this new and dangerous character upon the war. 

" National wars," observes Baron Jomini, " are of all wars 



146 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

the most formidable. This name can only be given to those 
which are carried on against a whole population animated 
with the fire of independence. In such wars every step is 
contested with a combat. The army which enters such a 
country holds only the ground on which it encamps : it can 
only supply itself at the point of the sword : its trains are 
everywhere threatened or destroyed." 

" To succeed in such a war," continues the same authority, 
" is always difficult. To display, in the first place, a mass of 
force proportionate to the resistance and the obstacles to be 
encountered ; to calm pojfndar passions by all possible means ; 
to let them, wear out with time / to display a great combina- 
tion of policy, of gentleness, and of severity / but above all 
things the greatest justice : these are the first elements and 
conditions of success." 

Of the truth of these sage counsels, the condensed results 
of the experience of civilization. General McClellan was pro- 
foundly convinced. To be convinced of them, indeed, it was 
only necessary to understand the principles on which the 
Union of these States had been formed, and to see with un- 
clouded vision the successive departures from those principles 
on the part of extreme and passionate, of ignorant and reck- 
less men in both sections, by dint of which secession and the 
war had been made possible. 

In his instructions to the commanders of departments the 
general-in-chief had accordingly endeavored to infuse into 
those commanders the spirit of these counsels, as their su- 
preme rule of conduct in dealing with the population around 
around them. 

But no such rule of conduct could be observed if the violent 
destruction of the social institution of slavery was to be con- 
sidered either a legitimate means or a legitimate end of the 
warfare to be waged in the name of the Constitution and the 
Union. And President Lincoln therefore completely aban- 
doned the mihtary politics of General McClellan's plan. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 147 

Of the strictly military programme embraced in that plan 
the President, on the contrary, unhesitatingly availed himself. 
Entirely ignorant, however, of the art of war, and conse- 
quently unable to appreciate intelligently the mutual relations 
of the different operations foreshadowed in the scheme, the 
President introduced into it such modifications, and imposed 
such delays upon the execution of its different parts, as, in 
the general result, have combined now with the effects of the 
presidential system of military politics to protract the conflict 
through now nearly four years. 

We have already seen how, after permitting General Burn- 
side to commence an attack upon the coast-line of North Caro- 
lina in accordance with a subsidiary part of General McClel- 
lan's programme, the President, upon taking general command 
of the army, so far suspended the execution of General McClel- 
lan's ulterior orders to that officer that the occupation of the 
Weldon and Wilmington Railroad, which General McClellan 
had intended should be accomplished in the early winter of 
1862, has absorbed the attention and wasted the forces of the 
grand army of General Grant during the summer and autumn 
of 1864. 

We shall now see that General Buell was intrusted by Gen- 
eral McClcUan, in November, 1861, to prepare for the imme- 
diate occupation of Eastern Tennessee, and for the cutting of 
the communications between Virginia and the Mississippi, 
neither of which objects has President Lincoln, since he as- 
sumed the command of the armies, in January, 1862, been 
able to achieve, although much costly time, much treasure, and 
many valuable lives have been lavished upon disconnected and 
inconsequential efforts to effect them. 

We shall see, also, that it was the intention of Genera 
McClellan, had he retained the supreme command of which he 
was deprived substantially in January, 1862, and formally in 
March, of the same year, to have pressed forward the forces 
under General Butler immediately after the capture of New 



148 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

Orleans, (in respect to which capture he anticipated, with rare 
sagacity, as " more than probable" precisely what did occur, 
" that the navy unassisted could accomplish the result") against 
" Jackson in Mississippi," for the purpose of " opening a com- 
munication with the Northern column" by the river. 

This part of General McClellan's plan President Lincoln en- 
tirely neglected, permitting General Butler to waste many 
months in the " civil administration" of the city of N"ew 
Orleans, which had surrendered to the fleet and was so entirely 
at the mercy of its guns, that, as General Butler himself testi- 
fies, having only two hundred and fifty men within the city 
limits, " we never had any trouble after the first day." Gen- 
eral Butler made no movement to communicate with Grant 
until June, when sickness had set in, and then with but four 
thousand or five thousand men.* 

How easily General McClellan's programme might have 
been carried out to the letter we now know. The Report of 
Major-General Mansfield Lovell of the " Confederate States 
Army," dated at Vicksburg, May 22, 1862, informs us that 
this officer upon the fall of N'ew Orleans retreated upon Jack- 
son and Vicksburg, at the head of no more than " four thou- 
sand five hundred troops, newly raised and equipped." These 
troops were "nothing but infantry and two batteries of field 
artillery," and were not fully armed and equipped at the time 
of the capture of the city. The result of a vigorous movement 
of General Butler's force of eighteen thousand men, cavalry, 
infantry, and artillery, in pursuit of General Lovell upon the 
points indicated by General McClellan, would have been to 
prevent the establishment of those batteries at Vicksburg, be- 
fore which the fleet and army of the West afterwards con- 
sumed themselves for more than a year, and which were finally 
turned and taken by General Grant, in July, 1863, by a bold 
and hazardous movement upon the very line which, as General 

* The capture of New Orleans. Report on Conduct of the War. 
Part III., p. 353. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 149 

McClellan had anticipated, was opened to the Army of the 
Gulf by the surrender of N'ew Orleans, in April, 1862. 

With these preliminary remarks I now submit to the reader 
the following Letters of Instruction, grouped under two ap- 
propriate headings. 

I.— OPERATIONS IN THE WEST. 

Headquakters op the Army, 
Washington, D. C, November 11, 1861. 

Maj.-Gen. H. W. Halleck, U. S. A., 

Gomd^g Depart, of Missouri : 
General : — ^In assigning you to the command of the De- 
partment of Missouri, it is probably unnecessary for me to 
st^^te that I have intrusted to you a duty which requires the 
utmost tact and decision. 

You have not merely the ordinary duties of a military com- 
mander to perform ; but the far more difficult task of reduc- 
ing chaos to order, of changing probably the majority of the 
personnel of the staff of the department, and of reducing to 
a point of economy consistent with the interests and necessi- 
ties of the state, a system of reckless expenditure and fraud 
perhaps unheard, of before in the history of the world. 

You will find in your department many general and staff 
officers holding illegal commissions and appoiniments not re- 
cognized or approved by the President or secretary of war, 
you will please at once inform these gentlemen of the nullity 
of their appointment, and see that no pay or allowances are 
issued to them until such time as commissions may be author- 
ized by the President or secretary of war. 

If any of them give the slightest trouble, you will at once 
arrest them and send them under guard, out of the limits of 
your department, informing them that if they return they will 
be placed in close confinement. You will please examine into 
the legality of the organization of the troops serving in the 



160 LIFE OP GEIT. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 

department. When yon find any illegal, unusual, or improper 
organizations you will give to the officers and men an oppor- 
tunity to enter the legal military establishment under general 
laws and orders from the War Department ; reporting in full to 
these headquarters any officer or organization that may decHne. 

You will please cause competent and reliable staff officers to 
examine all existing contracts immediately, and suspend all 
payments upon them until you receive the report in each case. 
Where there is the shghtest doubt as to the propriety of the 
contract, you will be good enough to refer the matter, with full 
explanations, to these headquarters, stating in each case what 
would be a fair compensation for the services or materials ren- 
dered under the contract. Discontinue at once the reception of 
material or services, under any doubtful contract. Arrest and 
bring to prompt trial all officers who have in any way violated 
their duty to the government. In regard to the pohtical con- 
duct of affairs, you will please labor to impress upon the in- 
habitants of Missouri and the adjacent States, that we are 
fighting solely for the integrity of the Union, to uphold the 
power of our national government and to restore to the na- 
tion the blessings of peace and good order. 

With respect to military operations, it is probable, from the 
best information in my jDOSsession, that the interests of the 
government will be best served by fortifying and holding in 
considerable strength, Rolla, Sedalia, and other interior points, 
keeping strong patrols constantly moving from the terminal 
stations, and concentrating the mass of the troops on or near 
the Mississippi, prepared for such ulterior operations as the 
public interests may demand. 

I would be glad to have you make, as soon as possible, a 
personal inspection of all the important points in your depart- 
ment, and report the result to me. I cannot too strongly im- 
press upon you the absolute necessity of keeping me constant- 
ly advised of the strength, condition, and location of your 
troops, together with all facts that will enable me to maintain 



LITE OP GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 151 

that general direction of the armies of the United States 
which it is my purpose to exercise. I trust to you to main- 
tain thorough organization, discipline, and economy through- 
out your department. Please inform me, as soon as possible, 
of everything relating to the gunboats now in process of con- 
struction, as well as those completed. 

The militia force authorized to be raised by the State of 
Missouri for its defence, will be under your orders. 
I am, General, &c., &c., 

George B. McClellan, 

li.-Gen. Com. IT. S. A. 



Headquakters op the Akmy) 
Washington, November 7, 1861. 
Brig.-Gen. D. C. Buell, 

Comd'g Depart, of the Ohio : 
General : — In giving you instructions for your guidance, 
in command of the Department of the Ohio, I do not design 
to fetter you. I merely wish to express plainly the gene- 
ral ideas which occur to me in relation to the conduct of 
operations there. That portion of Kentucky west of the 
Cumberland River is, by its position, so closely related to the 
States of Illinois and Missouri that it has seemed best to at-, 
tach it to the Department of Missouri. Your operations, 
then, in Kentucky will be confined to that portion of the State 
east of the Cumberland River. I trust I need not repeat to 
you that I regard the importance of the territory committed 
to your care as second only to that occupied by the army 
under my immediate command. It is absolutely necessary 
that we shall hold all the State of Kentucky ; not only that, 
but that the majority of its inhabitants shall be warmly in 
favor of our cause, it being that which best subserves their in- 
terests. It is possible that the conduct of our political affairs 
in Kentucky is more important than that of our military opera- 
tions. I certainly cannot overestimate the importance of the 



152 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

former. You will please constantly bear in mind the precise 
issue for which we are fighting — that issue is the preservation 
of the Union, and the restoration of the full authority of the 
general government over all portions of our territory. We 
shall most readily suppress this rebellion and restore the au" 
thority of the government by religiously respecting the con- 
stitutional rights of all. I know that I express the feelings 
and opinions of the President when I say that we are fighting 
only to preserve the integrity of the Union, and the constitu- 
tional authority of the general government. 

The inhabitants of Kentucky may rely upon it, that their 
domestic institutions will in no manner be interfered with, and 
that they will receive at our hands every constitutional pro- 
tection. I have only to repeat that you will, in all respects, 
carefully regard the local institutions of the region in which 
you command, allowing nothing but the dictates of military 
necessity to cause you to depart from the spirit of these in- 
structions. 

So much in regard to political considerations. The military 
problem would be a sim|)le one, could it be entirely separated 
from political influences ; such is not the case. Were the pop- 
ulation among which you are to operate w^holly or generally 
hostile, it is probable that Nashville should be your first and 
principal objective point. It so happens that a large majority of 
the inhabitants of Eastern Tennessee are in favor of the Union ; 
it therefore seems proper that you should remain on the de- 
fensive on the line from Louisville to Nashville, while you throw 
the mass of your forces, by rapid marches by Cumberland Gap or 
Walker's Gap, on Knoxville, in order to occupy the railroad at 
that point, and thus enable the loyal citizens of Eastern Ten- 
nessee to use, while you at the same time cut ofi", the railway 
communication between Eastern Virginia and the Mississippi. 

It will be prudent to fortify the pass, before leaving it in 
your rear. I am, &c., 

Geo. B. McClellan, 

Maj.-Gen. Cora. U. S. A. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 163 

Headqtjaetees of the Ahmy, 
Washington, Nov. 12, 1861. 
Brig.-Gen. D. C. Buell, 

Comdg. Dept. of the Ohio : 
General : Upon assuming command of the department, 
I will be glad to have you make, as soon as possible, a oareful 
report of the condition of your command. The main point to 
which I desire to call your attention, is the necessity of enter 
ing Eastern Tennessee as soon as it can be done with reasona- 
ble chances of success, and I hope that you will, with the least 
possible delay, organize a column for that purpose, sufficiently 
guarding at the same time the main avenues by which the 
rebels might invade Kentucky. Our conversations on the 
subject of military operations have been so full, and my confi- 
dence in your judgment is so great, that I will not dwell fur- 
ther on the subject, except to urge upon you the necessity of 
keeping me fully informed as to the state of afiairs, both mili- 
tary and political, and your movements. 

In regard to political matters, bear in mind that we are 
fighting only to preserve the integrity of the Union, and to 
uphold the general government ; as far as military necessity 
will permit, religiously respect the constitutional rights of all. 
Preserve the strictest discipline among the troops, and while 
employing the utmost energy in military movements, be care- 
ful so to treat the unarmed inhabitants as to contract, not 
widen, the breach existing between us and the rebels. I mean 
by this, that it is the desire of the government to avoid un- 
necessary irritation by causeless arrests and persecution of in- 
dividuals. Where there is good reason to believe that persons 
are actually giving aid, comfort or information to the enemy, 
it is of course necessary to arrest them ; but I have always 
found it is the tendency of subordinates to make vexatious ar- 
rests on mere suspicion. You will find it well to direct that no 
arrest shall be made except by your order, or that of your 
generals, unless in extraordinary cases, always holding the 



154 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

party making the arrest responsible for the propriety of his 
course. It should be our constant aim to make it apparent to 
all that their property, their comfort, and their personal safety, 
will be best preserved by adhering to the cause of the Union. 
If the military suggestions I have made in this letter prove 
to hsLyjQ been founded on erroneous data, you are, of course, 
perfectly free to change the plan of operations. 
I am, <fcc., &c., 

G. B. McClellait, 

Maj.-Gen. Com. U. S. A. 



n.— OPERATIONS IN THE SOUTH. 

Headquarteks of the Aemt, 
Washington, Feb. 14, 1862. 
Brig.-Gen. T. W. Sherman, 

Comd^g. at Port Royal^ c^c. .* 
General : Your dispatches in regard to the occupation 
of Dawfuskie Island, &c., were received to-day. I saw also 
to-day, for the first time, your requisition for a siege train for 
Savannah. 

After giving the subject all the consideration in my power, 
I am forced to the conclusion that, under present circumstan- 
ces, the siege and capture of Savannah do not promise results 
commensurate with the sacrifices necessary. When I learned 
that it was possible for the gunboats to reach the Savannah 
River above Fort Pulaski, two operations suggested them- 
selves to my mind, as its immediate results. 

First. The capture of Savannah by a " coup de main^"* the 
result of an instantaneous advance and attack by the army 
and navy. 

The time for this has passed, and your letter indicates that 
you are not accountable for the failure to seize the propitious 
moment, but that, on the contrary, you perceived its advan- 
tages. 



LIFE OF GEN-. GEORGE B. McCLELLAI?-. 155 

Second. To isolate Fort Pulaski, cut off its supplies, and at 
least facilitate its reduction by a bombardment. 

Although we have a long delay to deplore, the second 
course still remains open to us ; and I strongly advise the close 
blockade of Pulaski, and its bombardment as soon as the 13- 
inch mortars and heavy guns reach you. I am confident you 
can thus reduce it. With Pulaski, you gain all that is really 
essential; you obtain complete control of the harbor, you re- 
lieve the blockading fleet, and render the main body of your 
force disposable for other operations. 

I do not consider the possession of Savannah worth a siege, 
after Pulaski is in our hands. But the possession of Pulaski 
is of the first importance. The expedition to Fernandina is 
well, and I shall be glad to learn that it is ours. 

But, after all, the greatest moral effect would be produced 
by the reduction of Charleston and its defences. There the 
rebellion had its birth ; there the unnatural hatred of our gov- 
ernment is most intense; there is the centre of the boasted 
power and courage of the rebels. To gain Fort Sumter, and 
hold Charleston, is a task well worthy of our greatest efforts, 
and considerable sacrifices. That is the problem I would be 
glad to have you study. Some time must elapse before we can 
be in all respects ready to accomplish that purpose. Fleets are 
en Toute^ and armies in motion, which have certain preliminary 
objects to accomplish, before we are ready to take Charleston 
in hand. But the time will before long arrive, when I shall be 
prepared to make that movement. In the meantime, it is my 
advice and wish that no attempt be made upon Savannah, un- 
less it can be carried with certainty by a " coup de mainP 

Please concentrate your attention and forces upon Pulaski, 
and Fernandina. St. Augustine might as well be taken by 
way of an interlude, while awaiting the preparations for 
Charleston. Success attends us everywhere at present. 
Very truly yours, 

Geo. B. McClellan, 

Maj.-Gen. Com. U. S. A. 



156 life op gen. geoege b. mcclellan. 

Headquarteks of the Army, 
Washington, Feb. 23, 1862. 
Maj.-jQen. B. F. Butlee, 

TI. S. Volunteers: 
General : You are assigned to the command of the land 
forces destined to co-operate with the navy, in the attack upon 
New Orleans. You will use every means to keep your desti- 
nation a profound secret, even from your staff officers, with 
the exception of your chief of staff, and Lieutenant Weitzel, 
of the engineers. The force at your disposal will consist of 
the' first 13 regiments named in your memorandum handed to 
me in person, the 21st Indiana, 4th Wisconsin, and 6 th Michi- 
gan, (old and good regiments from Baltimore.) 

The 21st Indiana, 4th Wisconsin, and 6th Michigan, will 
await your orders- at Fort Monroe. 

Two companies of the 21st Indiana are well drilled as heavy 
artillery. The cavalry force already en route for Ship Island, 
will be sufficient for your purposes. 

After full consultation with officers well acquainted with the 
country in which it is proposed to operate, I have arrived at 
the conclusion that (2) two light batteries fully equipped, and 
(1) one without horses, will be all that are necessary. 

This will make your force about 14,400 infantry, 275 caval- 
ry, 680 artUlery; total, 15,255 men. 

The commanding general of the Department of Key West 
is authorized to loan you, temporarily, 2 regiments; Fort 
Pickens can probably give you another, which will bring your 
force to nearly 18,000. 

The object of your expedition is one of vital importance 
the capture of N'ew Orleans. The route selected is up th 
Mississippi River, and the first obstacle to be encountered 
(perhaps the only one,) is in the resistance offered by Forts St. 
Philip and Jackson. It is expected that the navy can reduce 
these works ; in that case, you will, after their capture, leave 
a sufficient garrison in them to render them perfectly secure ; 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 157 

and it is recommended, that on the upward passage, a few 
heavy guns, and some troops, be left at the Pilot Station, (at 
the forks of the river,) to cover a retreat in the event of a dis- 
aster. These troops and guns will, of course, be removed as 
soon as the forts are captured. 

Should the navy fail to reduce the works, you wiU land your 
forces and siege train, and endeavor to breach the works, 
silence their fire, and carry them by assault. 

The next resistance will be near the English Bend, where 
there are some earthen batteries ; here it may be necessary for 
you to land your troops and co-operate with the naval attack, 
although it is more than probable that the navy, unassisted, 
can accomplish the result. If these works are taken, the city 
of New Orleans necessarily falls. In that event, it will proba 
bly be best to occupy Algiers with the mass of your troops, 
also, the eastern bank of the river above the city ; it may be 
necessary to place some troops i7i the city to preserve order, 
but if there appears sufficient Union sentiment to control the 
city, it may be best for purposes of discipline, to keep your 
men out of the city. 

After obtaining possession of New Orleans, it will be neces- 
sary to reduce all the works guarding its approaches from the 
east, and particularly to gain the Manchac Pass. Baton 
Rouge, Berwick Bay^ and Fort Livingston, will next claim 
your attention. 

A feint on Galveston may facilitate the objects we have in 
view. I need not call your attention to the necessity of gain- 
ing possession of all the rolling stock you can on the different 
railways, and of obtaining control of the roads themselves 
The occupation of Baton Rouge by a combined naval and land 
force, should be accomplished as soon as possible after you 
have gained New Orleans. Then endeavor to open your com- 
munication with the northern column by the Mississippi, al- 
ways bearing in mind the necessity of occupying Jackson, Mis- 
sissippi, as soon as you can safely do so, either after, or before 



158 LIFE OF GEN. GEOBGE B. McCLELLAN. 

you have effected the junction. Allow nothing to divert you 
from obtaining full possession of all the approaches to New 
Orleans. When that object is accomplished to its fullest ex- 
tent, it will be necessary to make a combined attack on Mo- 
bile, in order to gain possession of the harbor and works, as 
well as to control the railway terminus at the city. 

In regard to this, I wiU send more detailed instructions as 
the operations of the northern column develop themselves. 

I may briefly state that the general objects of the expedition 
are : JFirst^ the reduction of New Orleans and all its approach- 
es : then Mobile and its defenses : then Pensacola, Galveston, 
&c. It is probable that by the time New Orleans is reduced 
it will be in the power of the government to reinforce the land 
forces sufficiently to accomplish all these objects : in the mean- 
time you will please give all the assistance in your power to 
the army and navy commanders in your vicinity, never losing 
sight of the fact, that the great object to be achieved is the 
capture and firm retention' of New Orleans. 
I am, &c., 

Geo. B. McCellan, 

Maj.-Gen. Com. U. S. A. 

" The plan indicated in the above letters," quietly observes 
General McClellan in his Report, " comprehended in its scope 
the operations of all the armies in the Union, the Army of the 
Potomac as well. It was my intention, for reasons easy to be 
seen, that its various parts should be carried out simultaneous- 
ly or nearly so, and in co-operation along our whole line. If 
this plan was wise, and events have failed to prove that it was 
not, then it is unnecessary to defend any delay which would 
have enabled the army of the Potomac to perform its share in 
the execution of the whole work." 

That in truth which needs defence in that period in the his- 
tory of the war upon which we are now entering is not any 
delay in the preparations making to enable the army of the 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 159 

Potomac to perform its share in the execution of General 
McClellan's plan of operations. 

It is the breaking of the faith pledged, not to General 
McClellan alone, but to the whole people of the Union when 
he was appointed to conceive and prepare a plan of operations, 
that in doing this duty he should receive the " confidence" and 
the " cordial support" necessary to his success. 

" I have no accusation against him" — said President Lincoln 
in a speech on the subject of General McClellan's change of 
base to the James Kiver, delivered by him in "Washington on 
the 6th of August, 1862, "I have no accusation against him. 
I believe he is a brave and able man, and I stand here, as jus- 
tice requires me to do, to take npon myself what has been 
charged on the secretary of war, as withholding from him." 

General McClellan, in his turn, brings no accusation against 
President Lincoln. The official proprieties of his position as 
a Major-General in the army of the United States, forbid him 
so to do. 

But it is perfectly certain that either against President Lin- 
coln or against General McClellan the armies and the people 
of the United States have a very serious " accusation" to bring. 
Against whom that accusation shall be brought must be de- 
cided by a single consideration, " by whom were the conditions 
under which the campaign of the army of the Potomac, in the 
spring of 1862, was commenced and prosecuted, finally and 
supremely controlled ?" 



CHAPTER VII. 

CONGRESS AND THE "WAR. THE JOINT COMMITTEE AND THE NEW WAH 
SECRETARY, MR. STANTON. THE PRESIDENT ASSUMES COMMAND OP THE 
ARMIES, AND SUPERSEDES GENERAL MCCLELLAN. PRELIMINARY HIS- 
TORY OP THE CAMPAIGN OP THE PENINSULA. 

About the en^ of the year 1861, General McClellan, worn 
down with indplant and exhausting labor was prostrated with 
a severe illness/ On his recovery towards the middle of Jan- 
uary he found that his relations with the civil executive were 
likely to be seriously modified by two important events which 
had occurred in the interval. 

Shortly after the meeting of Congress in December, a joint 
committee on the conduct of the war had been appointed by 
that body. The proper sphere of duty of such a committee 
would of course have been a candid and systematic inquiry 
into things actually accomplished. The members of the com- 
mittee, however^ did not so limit their notions of theiv func- 
tions. They considered themselves to be a sort of Aulic Coun- 
cil clothed with authority to supervise the plans of command- 
ers in the field, to make military suggestions, and to dictate 
military appointments. This is evident from their own report 
of their proceedings ; and it is necessary therefore to- notice 
here the constitution of the committee, and its competency to 
the work to which at this most critical moment of the war, its 
members addressed themselves. 

The committee consisted of six members, two from the 
Senate and four from the House of Representatives. With the 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 161 

exception of a single representative from "New York, these 
gentlemen belonged to the Republican party, and the most 
conspicuous of them, Mr. Wade, of Ohio, and Mr. Chandler, 
of Michigan, to the extreme section of that party. 

N'one of them were possessed of any military experience. 
They had, however, extremely well-defined and positive no- 
tions in respect to the " politics of war," and that these notions 
were diametrically antagonistic to those held upon the same 
subject by the commander-in-chief of the forces, will sufficient- 
ly appear from the following extract from a majority report in 
relation to the conduct of the war under General Fremont in 
Missouri. 

" That feature of General Fremont's administration which 
attracted the most attention at the time, and which will ever 
be most prominent simong the many parts of interest connected 
with the history of that department, is his proclamation of 
emancipation. Whatever opinion may be entertained in refe- 
rence to the time when the proclamation of emancipation 
should have been inaugurated, or by whose authority it should 
have been promulgated, there can be no doubt that General 
Fremont at that early day rightly judged in regard to the 
most effective means of subduing this rebellion. In proof of 
that it is only necessary to refer to the fact that his successor, 
when transferred to another department, issued a proclama- 
tion embodying the same principle.* And the President, as 
commander-in-chief of the army and navy, has applied the 
same principle to all the rebellious States, and few will deny 

* This successor was General David Hunter, who, having been 
transferred to the command in South Carolina, issued there a proclama- 
tion " embodying the principle" of emancipation. Whether the effec- 
tiveness of this " means of subduing the rebellion" was " proved" by the 
publication of General Hunter's proclamation may perhaps be ques- 
tioned when we consider that the rebellion has not yet been subdued in 
South Carolina nor even in Missouri, and that General Hunter, after is- 
suing his " proclamation" was removed from the former department, as 
he had been from the latter, leaving no trace of his presence in a single 
military or political advantage gained for the cause of the Union. 



162 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

that it must be adhered to till the last vestige of treason and 
rebellion is destroyed." 

That a committee on the conduct of the war holding such 
views of the poUtics of war should bestow either " confidence" 
or " cordial support " upon a commander-in-chief whose whole 
military policy was based on the principle that everything 
ought to be done to quiet and nothing to inflame those pas- 
sions of the people of the seceded States in which resided the 
real strength of their armies in the field, it was of course ab- 
surd to expect. It became, therefore, a matter of vital im- 
portance to the future of General McClellan's operations, that 
this committee should in no manner be sufiered to interfere 
with the active management of military affairs. 

During the interval which had witnessed the first reaching- 
forth of this committee after the control of the war, another 
change, not less momentous, had occurred in the administra- 
tive machinery at Washington. 

Mr. Cameron had retked from the war office,- and had been 
succeeded by Mr. Stanton. 

Mr. Stanton brought with him to the duties of this most 
arduous and responsible post no administrative experience, 
but an established reputation for activity, energy, and all those 
indefinable, but easily recognizable, qualities which are com- 
monly spoken of as "talents for business ;" qualities which, in 
such a field of duty as that to which Mr. Stanton was now 
called, may make a man either the most useful or the most 
mischievous of ministers, accordingly as they are, or are not, 
under the control of a well-balanced character, of a liberal 
mind, and of a disposition naturally just. 

Mr. Stanton was appointed secretary of war on the 14th 
of January, 1862. Seven days afterwai'ds, on the 21st of 
January, the new secretary permitted the chairman of the 
committee on the conduct of the war to address to him the 
following letter : 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 163 

Sir : — I am instructed by the joint committee on the conduct 
of the present war, to inquire of you whether there is such an 
oflSce as commander-in-chief of the armies of the United States, 
or any grade above that of major-general ? If so, by what 
authority is it credited ? Does it exist by virtue of any law 
of Congress, or any usage of the government ? Please give 
us the information asked for at your convenience. 

I remain, &c., B. F. Wade, Chairman. 

Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War. 

Had General McClellan been aware of the fact that such a 
letter as this had been addressed to the new secretary he 
could scarcely have failed to understand that a deliberate 
attack was about to be made by the joint committee of Con- 
gress, in conjunction with that minister, upon his own position 
at the head of the armies, and upon the " confidence" and 
*' cordial support" which had been pledged to him by the 
President. 

The letter, too, was a direct insult to the President, who 
had appointed General McClellan in November to fill the ofiice 
of which this committee question the existence, so direct an 
insult, that one is at a loss to understand how the newly 
appointed secretary should have ventured to risk his official 
position by making himself a party to it, unless, indeed, the 
whole matter had been concerted and brought about with the 
full knowledge and consent of the President himself 

Of the intellectual fitness of the new secretary for his new 
position, he himself gave the public a safe measure in a letter 
which he addressed to the New-York Tribune^ about a month 
after his appointment ; and by the reflected light of which we 
may now fairly estimate the temper which he must have 
brought, in January, to the grave questions of command then 
about to be decided. This letter was written on the occa- 
sion of some slight advantage won over a handful of the enemy 
by an enterprising officer at the head of a small body of men : 



164 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

Sir :— I cannot suffer undue merit to be ascribed to my 
official action. The merit of our recent victories belongs to 
the gallant officers and men that fought the battles. No share 
of it belongs to me. 

Much has been recently said of military combination and 
organizing victory. I hear such phrases with apprehension. 
They commenced in infidel France with the Italian campaign, 
and resulted in Waterloo. Who can organize victory ? Who 
can combine the elements of success on the battle-field ? We 
owe our recent victories to the spirit of the Lord that moved 
our soldiers to dash into battle, and filled the hearts of our 
enemies with terror and dismay. The inspiration that con- 
quered in battle was in the hearts of the soldiers and from on 
high. Patriotic spirit, with resolute courage, in men and 
officers, is a military coinbination that never failed. 

We may well rejoice at the recent victories, for they teach 
us that battles are to be won now, and by us, in the same and 
only manner that they were ever won by any people, or in any 
age since the days of Joshua — by boldly pursuing and strik- 
ing the foe. What, under the blessings of jProvidence, I con- 
ceive to be the true organization of victory and military 
combination to end this war, was declared in a few words by 
General Grant, made to General Buckner, "I propose to 
move immediately on your works." 

The official who could venture to print such a farrago of furious 
cant as this in February, it may well be believed, was in no 
condition to comprehend, in January, the patient, practical and 
thorough combinations of the commander-in-chief, to the effec- 
tiveness of whose " organization of victory," interrupted 
though it was now about to be, the country was destined to be 
indebted for the opportunity afforded to General Grant of 
moving immediately upon the enemy's works. 

In his first interviews with the new secretary, General 
McClellan, of course, heard nothing of the machinations then 
going on for the overthrow of his plans. The secretary urged 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. MCCLELLAN. 165 

upon him, in these interviews, the propriety of attempting two 
operations, the practicability of which had been often before 
considered by General McClellan in concert with the govern- 
ment, and which it had been repeatedly shown that it would 
be in the last degree unwise to undertake until the armies was 
in readiness for grander and more decisive movements. 

These operations were the re-opening of the Baltimore and 
Ohio Railroad, and the raising of the blockade of the Potomac 
by the rebel batteries on its banks. 

However annoying the presence of the enemy on these 
great lines of communication might be, it was no more annoy- 
ing in January, 1861, than it had been for five months pre- 
viously; and as the general-in-chief had been permitted to 
reserve his force up to this time for the great operations, one 
admitted consequence of which was to be the complete accom- 
plishment of these secondary objects, it is difficult to under- 
stand what possible practical motive there can have been to 
urge the tardy suspension of preparations, fast ripening to 
perfection, and the diversion of the army upon such expeditions. 
The true state of the case, in respect both to the blockade of 
the railroad and the blockade of the river is clearly given by 
General McGlellan in his report, and so much of his remarks 
on these subjects as is necessary to a clear understanding of 
them may well be transferred to these pages. 

THE ENEMY'S BATTERIES ON THE POTOMAC. 

The attention of the navy department, as early as August 
12, 1861, had been called to the necessity of maintaining a 
strong force of efficient war vessels on the Potomac. 

Headquarters Division Potomac, 
Washington, August 13, 1861. 
Hon. Gideon Welles, Secretary TI. S. Navy : 

Sir, — I have to-day received additional information which 



166 UrE OF GEN. GEOBGE B. McCLELLAN. 

convinces me that it is more than probable that the enemy- 
will, within a very short time, attempt to throw a respectable 
force from the mouth of Acquia Creek into Maryland. This 
attempt will probably be preceded by the erection of batteries 
at Mathias and White House Points. Such a movement on 
the part of the enemy, in connection with others probably de- 
signed, would place Washington in great jeopardy. I most 
earnestly urge that the strongest possible naval force be at 
once concentrated near the mouth of Acquia Creek, and that 
the most vigilant watch be maintained day and night, so as to 
render such passage of the river absolutely impossible. 

I recommend that the Minnesota, and any other vessels 
available from Hampton Roads, be at once ordered up there, 
and that a great quantity of coal be sent to that vicinity, suf- 
ficient for several weeks' supply. At least one strong war 
vessel should be kept at Alexandria; and I again urge the 
concentration of a strong naval force in the Potomac without 
delay. 

If the naval department will render it absolutely impossible 
for the enemy to cross the river below Washington, the secu- 
rity of the capital will be greatly increased. 

I cannot too earnestly urge an immediate compliance with 
these requests. 

I am, sir, very respectfully, your obedient servant, 

G. B. McClellan, Major-Gen eral Commanding. 

It was on the 27th September, 1861, that General Barnard, 
chief engineer, in company with Captain Wyman, of the Poto- 
mac flotilla, had been instructed to make a reconnoissance of 
the enemy's batteries as far as Mathias Point. In his report 
of his observations he says : " Batteries at High Point and 
Cockpit Point, and thence down to Chopawampsic, cannot be 
prevented. We may, indeed, prevent their construction on 
certain points, but along here, somewhere, the enemy can es- 
tablish, in spite of us, as many batteries as he chooses. What 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 167 

is the remedy? Favorable circumstances, not to be anticipa- 
ted nor made the basis of any calculations, might justify and 
render successful the attack of a particular battery. To suppose 
that we can capture all^ and by mere attacks of this kind pre- 
vent the navigation being molested, is very much the same as 
to suppose that the hostile army in our own front can prevent 
us building and maintaining field-works to protect Arlington 
and Alexandria by capturing them one and all as fast as they 
are built." 

In another communication upon the subject of crossing 
troops for the purpose of destroying the batteries on the Vir- 
ginia side of the Potomac, General Barnard says : 

*' The operation involves the forcing of a very strong line of 
defence of the enemy, and all that we would have to do, if we 
were really opening a campaign against them there. It is true 
we hope to force this line by turning it, by landing on Free- 
stone Point. 

* With reason to believe that this may be successful, it can- 
not be denied that it involves a risk of failure. 

" Should we then, considering all the consequences which 
may be involved, enter into the operation merely to capture 
the Potomac batteries ? / think not. 

" Will not the Ericsson, assisted by one other gunboat, ca- 
pable of keeping alongside these batteries, so far control their 
fire as to keep the navigation sufficiently free as long as we 
require it ? Captain Wyman says yes." 

It was the opinion of competent naval officers, and I concur 
with them, that had an adequate force of strong and well- 
armed vessels been acting upon the Potomac from the begin- 
ning of August, it would have been next to impossible for the 
rebels to have constructed or maintained batteries upon the 
banks of the river.* The enemy never occupied Mathias Point, 

* See remarks of Lieutenant Wise, U. S. N., in Russell's " Diary Nort^ 
and Soutli." " The navy are writhing under the disgrace of the Poto 
mac blockade." Ihid., Dec. 13, 1861. 



168 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

nor any other point on the river, which was out of supporting 
distance from their mam army. 

"When the enemy commenced the construction of these bat- 
teries, the Army of the Potomac was not in condition to pre- 
vent it ; their destruction by our army would have afforded 
but a temporary relief, unless we had been strong enough to 
hold the entire line of the Potomac. This could be done either 
by driving the enemy from Manassas and Acquia Creek by 
main force, or by manoeuvring to compel them to evacuate 
their positions. The latter course was finally pursued, and 
with success. 

THE BALTIMORE AND OHIO RAILROAD. 

I had often observed to the President, and to members of 
the cabinet, that the reconstruction of this railway could not 
be undertaken until we were in a condition to fight a battle to 
secure it. I regarded the possession of Winchester and Stras- 
burg as necessary to cover the railway in rear, and it was not 
until the month of February that I felt prepared to accomplish 
this very desirable, but not vital purpose. 

The whole of Banks* division, and two brigades of Sedg- 
wick's division, were thrown across the river at Harper's Fer- 
ry, leaving one brigade of Sedgwick's division to observe and 
guard the Potomac from Great Falls to the mouth of the Mo- 
nocacy. A sufficient number of troops, of all arms, were held 
in readiness in the vicinity of Washington, either to march via 
Leesburg or to move by rail to Harper's Ferry, should this 
become necessary in carrying out the objects in view. The 
subjoined notes from a communication subsequently addressed 
to the war department will sufficiently explain the conduct of 
these operations : 

" When I started for Harper's Ferry I plainly stated to the 
President and secretary of war that the chief object of the 
operation would be to open the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 169 

by crossing the river in force at Harper's Ferry ; that I had 
collected the material for making a permanent bridge by 
means of canal-boats ; that from the nature of the river it was 
doubtful whether such a bridge could be constructed ; that if 
it could not I would at least occupy the ground in front of 
Harper's Ferry, in order to cover the rebuilding of the railroad 
bridge, and finally, when the communication was perfectly se- 
cure, move on Winchester. 

" When I arrived at the place I found the bateau bridge 
nearly completed; the holding ground proved better than had 
been anticipated, the weather was favorable, there being no 
wind. I at once crossed over the two brigades which had 
arrived, and took steps to hurry up the other two, belonging 
respectively to Banks' and Sedgwick's divisions. The diffi- 
culty of crossing supplies had not then become apparent. 
That night I telegraphed for a regiment of regular cavalry and 
four batteries of heavy artillery to come up the next day, 
(Thursday,) besides directing Keyes' division of infantry to be 
moved up on Friday. 

" Next morning the attempt was made to pass the canal- 
boats through the lift lock, in order to commence at once the 
construction of a permanent bridge ; it was then found for the 
first time that the lock was too small to permit the passage of 
the boats, it having been built for a class of boats running on 
the Shenandoah canal, and too narrow by some four or six 
inches for the canal-boats. The lift locks above and below 
are all large enough for the ordinary boats. I had seen them 
at Edwards' Ferry thus used ; it had always been represented 
to the engineers by the military railroad employees and others 
that the lock was large enough, and the difference being too 
small to be detected by the eye, no one had thought of meas- 
uring it, or suspected any difficulty. I thus suddenly found 
myself unable to build the permanent bridge. A violent gale 
had arisen, which threatened the safety of our only means of 
communication; the narrow approach to the bridge was so 



170 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

crowded and clogged with wagons that it was very clear that 
under existing circumstances nothing more could be done than 
to cross over the baggage and supplies of the two brigades; 
of these, instead of being able to cross both during the morn- 
ing, the last arrived only in time to go over just before dark. 
It was evident that the troops under orders would only be in 
the way should they arrive, and that it would not be possible 
to subsist them for a rapid march to Winchester; it was 
therefore deemed necessary to countermand the order, content 
ourselves with covering the reopening of the railroad for the 
present, and in the mean time use every exertion to establish, 
as promptly as possible, depots of forage and subsistence on 
the Virginia side, to supply the troops and enable them to 
move on Winchester independently of the bridge. The next 
day (Friday) I sentfi strong reconnoissance to Charleston, and 
Tinder its protection went there myself. I then determined to 
hold that place, and to move the troops composmg Lander's 
and Williams' commands at once on Martinsburg and Bunker 
Hill, thus effectually covering the reconstruction of the rail- 
road. 

" Having done this, and taken all the steps in my power to 

• T 

ensure the rapid transmission of supplies over the river, I re- 
turned to this city, well satisfied with what had been ac- 
complished. While up the river I learned that the President 
was dissatisfied with the state of affairs— but on my return 
here, understood from the secretary of war that, upon learn- 
ing the whole state of the case, the President was fully satis- 
fied. I contented myself, therefore, with giving to the secre- 
tary a brief statement about as I have written it here." 

The design aimed at was entirely compassed, and before the 
1st of April, the date of my departure for the Peninsula, the 
railroad was in running order. As a demonstration upon the 
left flank of the enemy, this movement no doubt assisted in 
determining the evacuation of his lines on the 8th and 9th of 
March." 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. I7l 

After discussing these questions with General McClellan, 
Mr. Stanton inquired into his general plan of campaign, and 
particularly into that part of the plan which was to be execu- 
ted by the Array of the Potomac, and effect the reduction of 
Richmond. General McClellan having explained his designs 
on this subject verbally to the secretary, that official request- 
ed him to develop them more fully to the President. 

Already unavow^dly at odds with the general-in-chief in re- 
spect to his notions of the politics of the war, the President 
now revealed his disposition to put a serious practical con- 
struction on his own official rank as commander of the army 
and navy of the tJnion. He listened to the plan of General 
McClellan, raised objections to it, and sketched one of his own, 
which he suggested to the adnuratiou and the adoption of his 
interlocutor. 

It would seem that from a very early period in the history 
of the war the President had been visited with military illu. 
minations. It has already been shown from the testimony of 
General Irwin McDowell, given before the joint committee 
on the conduct of the war, that during the operations pre- 
liminary to the first battle of Bull Run the President was in 
the habit of discussing and passing sentence upon the military 
projects of Lieutenant-General Scott ; and a singular passage 
from the diary of the London Times correspondent, Mr. W. 
H. Russell, informs us that in the very outset of hostilities the 
President gave direct orders for a naval movement which, had it 
been attempted, must have almost certainly inflicted a serious 
misfortune upon our naval force, and that, too, at a moment 
when we could ill have afforded the loss of a single gun afloat.* 

* This passage is so extremely curious, and seems to have excited so 
little attention, that I transcribe it. Under the date of August 31st, 1862, 
Mr. Russell writes : " I dined with Lieutenant Wise, and met Captain 
Dahlgren, Captain Foote, and Colonel Fletcher Webster. * * Incidentally 
I learned from the conversation — and it is a curious illustration of the 
power of the President — that it was he who ordered the attack on 
Charleston Harbor, or, to speak with more accuracy, the movement of 



172 LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 

The events of July 21st, 1861, appear to have quieted for a 
time the military aspiratioDS of Mr. Lincoln. But they were 
now reviving, whether by the sheer force of nature, or under 
the manipulations of a secretary of war, who believed in bat- 
tles by a divine inspiration, and of a joint committee confi- 
dent in the military efficacy of exasperating proclamations it 
is not now material to inquire ; and General McClellan, after 
holding the position of commander-in-chief of the armies for 
nearly three months, and preparing a complete and thorough 
plan of operations against the enemy, with the distinct under- 
standing that all the time and materials and authority neces- 
sary to its successful execution would be secured to him by 
the "confidence" and "cordial support" of the President, 
found himself called upon to submit one of the most material 
features of that plan to the uninstructed revision of that great 
functionary. 

While this cloud still lowered upon the spirits of the young 
general, and upon the military hopes of the country, the Presi- 
dent, as has been heretofore shown, suddenly took the whole 
matter into his own hands, and assumed the command of the 
armies in the following war order, which I have already given, 
but which I give again, as essential to this part of the narra- 
tive: 

Executive Mansion, 
Washington, January 27, 1862. 
President's General War Order, No. 1. 

Ordered: That the 22d day of February, 1862, be the day 
for a general movement of the land and naval forces of the 
United States against the insurgent forces. 

the armed squadron to relieve Sumter by force if necessary ; and that 
he came to the conclusion it was feasfible, privA:,ipally from reading the ac- 
count of the attack on Kinhurn hy the allied fleets. There was certainly 
an immense disproportion between the relative means of attack and de- 
fence in the two cases ; but, at all events, the action of the Confederates 
prevented the attempt." 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. l73 

That, especially, 

The army at and about Fortress Monroe, 

The army of the Potomac, 

The army of Western Virginia, 

The army near Mumfordsville, Kentucky, 

The army and flotilla at Cairo, 

And a naval force in the Gulf of Mexico, be ready to move 
on that day. 

That all other forces, both land and naval, with their re- 
spective commanders, obey existing orders for the time, and 
be ready to obey additional orders when duly given. 

That the heads of departments, and especially the secreta- 
ries of war and of the navy, with all their subordinates, and 
the general-in-chief, with all their commanders and subordin- 
ates of land and naval forces, will severally be held to their 
strict and full responsibilities for prompt execution of this 
order. Abraham Lincoln. 

Of course neither Mr. Lincoln himself, nor Mr. Stanton, 
nor even the joint committee on the conduct of the war, 
can have regarded this " order" as a serious war measure. 
Couched in a style which recalls the heraldic recitation of a 
great English nobleman's titles of honor and dignity over his 
grave ere the steward breaks his wand of office, and the dust 
is left in peace with its kindred dust : appointing with dra- 
matic affectation a popular anniversary for the achievement of 
military impossibilities, this order N'o. 1 would go down into 
history simply as a model of the grotesque in executive as- 
sumption, had not many subsequent events given to it a 
melancholy significance as the first autographic evidence of Mr. 
Lincoln's personal and fatal interference in the military con- 
duct of the war. 

It was followed up four days afterwards by the Special War 
Order No. 1, in which the President, having already resumed 
the active command of the armies in general, next resumed 



174 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

the active command of the Army of the Potomac in particular. 
This order, it will be recollected, ran thiis : 

Executive Mansion, 
Washington, Januarj 31, 1862. 
Peesident's Special War Order, "No.- 1. 

Ordered : That all the disposable force of the Army of the 
Potomac, after providing safely for the defence of Washing- 
ton, be formed into an expedition for the immediate object of 
seizing and occupying a point upon the railroad southwest- 
ward of what is known as Manassas Junction, all details to be 
in the discretion of the commander-in-chief, and the expedition 
to move on or before the 22d day of February next. 

Abraham Lincoln. 

Whether the new commander-in-chief of the United States 
army and of the Army of the Potomac, when he thus gave 
General Johnston a three weeks' warning of his intention to 
march upon Manassas Junction, supposed that the Confede- 
rate general and his army, paralyzed by fear of their impend- 
ing fate, would helplessly await his onset in a state of exanim- 
ation, or whether he imagined that the rebels, excited by the 
fear of losing the earthw^orks which, as the New York 7}'i- 
buneand other radical journals declared at the time they had 
mounted only with *' Quaker guns," would hurry forward all 
their forces to the place by him appointed, and there, upon the 
day by him appointed, open a grand tournament to decide the 
issues of the war, cannot now be clearly settled. 

Puerile as the order was in itself, and supremely ridiculous ^ 
as it must have seemed to the enemy, it was portentous of 
mischief to the Federal cause. General McClellan lost no 
time in seeing the President, and requesting to know definitely 
whether it was expected that he should abandon all considera- 
tion of the plan of campaign upon which he had himself de- 
cided, and adopt the project set forth in this new and special 
order. The President graciously gave him permission to set 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 175 

forth iii writing his reasons for desiring to adhere to his own 
well-matured designs. 

Before the paper, which General McClellan in accordance 
with this permission at once began to draw up, was prepared, 
he received from the President the following characteristic 
note : 

Executive Mansion, 
Washington, February 3, 1863. 
Maj.-Gen. McClellan, — 

My Deae Sie, — You and I have distinct and different plans 
for a movement of the Army of the Potomac. Yours to be 
done by the Chesapeake, up the Rappahannock to Urbanna, 
and across and to the terminus of the railroad on the York 
River : mine to move directly to a point on the railroad south- 
west of Manassas. 

If you will give rae satisfactory answers to the following 
questions, I shall gladly yield my plan to yours : 

1st. Does not your plan involve a greatly larger expenditure 
of time and money than mine ? 

2d. Wherein is a victory more certain by your plan than 
mine? 

3d. Wherein is a victory more valuable by your plan than 
mine? 

4th. In fact, would it not be less valuable in this ; that it 
would break no great line of the enemy's communications, 
while mine would ? 

5th. In case of disaster, would not a retreat be more difficult 
by your plan than mine ? 

Yours truly, 

Abraham Lincoln. 

Rarely, if ever, in the history of the world, have the honesty 
and the patriotism of a military commander been subjected to 
so trying a test as this letter applied to General McClellan. 

The President had now openly taken upon himself the direc- 
tion of the national armies. Had General McClellan been a 



176 LIFE OP GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

commonly selfish man, had he not wholly sunk all considera- 
tion of the slight and injustice put himself in his fear and con- 
cern for the safety of his brave army, and of the cause to 
which, and not to the President, he had given his sword, he 
might now have waived the unequal contest with arrogance 
and incapacity in the seat of power : he might have accepted, 
in the really subordinate position to which the President had 
so cavalierly reduced him, the presidential plan of campaign : 
he might have contented himself with attempting, as the 
lieutenant of this new and most eccentric general, to put it 
into execution. 

But this General McClellan could not do. 

He went on manfully with the ungrateful task of stating his 
reasons for doing what by every consideration of decency, 
justice, good faith,- and common sense, he was entitled to do 
unchallenged and unquestioned. Those reasons he embodied 
in the following letter, handed to the secretary of war on the 
same day on which Mr. Lincoln's " note of inquiry " reached 
him : 

Headqxtaktees op the Army, 
WAsmNGTON, Feb. 3, 1863. 
Hon. E. M. Stanton, 

S>e<^y of War, — 

Sir, — I ask your indulgence for the following paper, ren- 
dered necessary by circumstances : 

I assumed command of the troops in the vicinity of Wash- 
ington on Saturday, July 27, 1861, six days after the battle 
of Bull Run. I found no army to command ; a mere collec- 
tion of regiments, cowering on the banks of the Potomac, 
some perfectly raw, others dispirited by the recent defeat, 
JSTothing of any consequence had been done to secure the 
southern approaches to the capital by means of defensive 
works — nothing whatever had been undertaken to defend the 
avenues to the city on the northern side of the Potomac. The 
troops were not only undisciplined, undrilled, and dispirited ; 



LIFE OF GEN-. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAK. 177 

they were not even placed in military positions ; the city was 
almost in a condition to have been taken by a dash of a regi- 
ment of cavalry. 

Without one day's delay, I undertook the difficult task 
assigned to me ; that task the honorable secretary knows was 
given to me without my solicitation or foreknowledge. How 
far I have accomplished it will best be shown by the past and 
the present. The capital is secure against attack ; the exten- 
sive fortifications erected by the labor of our troops enable a 
small garrison to hold it against a numerous army ; the enemy 
have been held in check ; the State of Maryland is securely in 
our possession; the detached counties of Virginia are again 
within the pale of our laws, and all apprehension of trouble in 
Delaware is at an end : the enemy are confined to the positions 
they occupied before the disaster of the 21st J uly : more than all 
this, I have now under my command a well-drilled and reliable 
army, to which the destinies of the country may be confidently 
committed : this army is young and untried in battle, but it is 
animated by the highest spirit, and is capable of great deeds. 
That so much has been accomplished, and such an army cre- 
ated, in so short a time, from nothing, will hereafter be re- 
garded as one of the highest glories of the administration and 
the nation. Many weeks — I may say many months ago, this 
Army of the Potomac was fully in condition to repel any attack; 
but there is a vast difference between that and the efficiency 
required to enable troops to attack successfully an army elated 
])y victory and intrenched in a position long since selected, 
studied and fortified. In the earliest papers I submitted to 
the President, I asked for an effective and movable force far 
exceeding the aggregate of that now on the banks of the 
Potomac. I have not the force I asked for. Even when in a 
subordinate position, I always looked beyond the operations 
of the Army of the Potomac. I was never satisfied in my own 
mind with a barren victory, but looked to .combined and de- 
cisive operations. 



178 LIFE OP GEX. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

When I was placed in command of the armies of the United 
States, I immediately turned my attention to the whole field 
of operations, regarding the Army of the Potomac as only one^ 
while the most important, of the masses under my command. 
I confess that I did not then appreciate the total absence of {; 
general plan, which had before existed — ^nor did I know that 
utter disorganization and want of preparation pervaded the 
Western armies. I took it for granted that they were nearly, 
if not quite, in condition to move toward the fulfilment of my 
plans ; I acknowledge that I made a great mistake. I sent at 
once, with the approval of the executive, officers I considered 
competent to command in Kentucky and Missouri — their 
instructions looked to prompt movements — I soon found that 
the labor of creation and organization had to be performed 
there ; transportation, arms, clothing, artillery, discipline, all 
were wanting ; these things required time to procure them. 
The generals in command have done their work most credita- 
bly — but we are still delayed. I had hoped that a general 
advance could be made during the good weather of December ; 
I was mistaken. My wish was to gain possession of the East- 
ern Tennessee Railroad as a preliminary movement — then to 
follow it up immediately by an attack on Nashville and Rich- 
mond, as nearly at the same time as possible. I have ever 
regarded our true poUcy as being that of fully preparing our- 
selves, and then seeking for the most decisive results. I do not 
wish to waste life in useless battles — but I prefer to strike at 
the heart. Two bases of operations seem to present themselves 
for the advance of the army of the Potomac. \st. That ot 
Washington, its present position, involving a direct attack 
upon the intrenched positions of the enemy at Centreville, 
Manassas, &c., or else a movement to turn one or both flanks 
of those positions ; or a combination of the two plans. The 
relative force of the two armies will not justify an attack on both 
flanks ; an attack ©n his left flank alone involves a long line of 
wagon communication, and cannot prevent him from collecting 



LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 179 

for the decisive battle all the detachments now on his extreme 
right a^d left. Should we attack his right flank by the line of the 
Occoquan, and a crossing of the Potomac below that river, 
and near his batteries, we could, perhaps, prevent the junction 
of the enemy's right with his centre, (we might destroy the 
former,) we woulti remove the obstructions to the navigation 
of the Potomac, reduce the length of wagon transportation by 
establishing new depots at the nearest points of the Potomac, 
and strike more directly his main railway communication. 

The fords of Occoquan, below the mouth of Bull Run, are 
watched by the rebels ; batteries are said to be placed on the 
heights in rear, (concealed by the woods,) and the arrange- 
ment of his troops is such that he can oppose some considera- 
ble resistance to a passage of that stream. Information has 
just been received, to the effect that the enemy are intrenching 
a line of heights, extending from the vicinity of Sangsters, 
(Union Mills,) towards Evansport. Early in January, Sprigg's 
Ford was occupied by General Rhodes, with 3,600 men and 
eight guns. There are strong reasons for believing that Davis' 
Ford is occupied. These circumstances indicate, or prove, 
that the enemy anticipates the move in question, and is pre- 
pared to resist it. Assuming, for the present, that this opera- 
tion is determined upon, it may be well to examine briefly its 
probable progress. In the present state of affairs, our columns 
(for the movement of so large a force must be made in several 
columns, at least five or six) can reach Accotinck without dan- 
ger ; during the march thence to the Occoquan, our right flank 
becomes exposed to an attack from Fairfax Station, Sangsters 
and Union Mills. This danger must be met by occupying, in 
some force, either the two first-named places, or, better, the 
point of junction of the roads leading to the village of Occo- 
quan. This occupation must be sustaiped so long as we con- 
tinue to draw supplies by the roads from the city, or until a 
battle is won. 

The crossing of the Occoquan should be made at all the 



180 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

fords from Wolf's Run to the mouth, the points of crossing 
not being necessarily confined to the fords themselves. Should 
the enemy occupy this line in force we must, with what assist- 
ance the flotilla can aflbrd, endeavor to force the passage near 
the mouth, thus forcing the enemy to abandon the whole line, 
or be taken in flank himself %. 

Having gained the line of the Occoquan, it would be neces- 
sary to throw a column, by the shortest route, to Dumfries, 
partly to force the enemy to abandon his batteries on the 
Potomac, partly to cover our left flank against an attack from 
the direction of Acquia; and, lastly, to establish our communi- 
cation with the river by the best roads, and thus give us new 
depots. The enemy would, by this time, have occupied the 
line of the Occoquan above Bull Run, holding Brentsville in 
force, and, perhaps, extending his lines somewhat further to 
the southwest. 

Our next step would be to prevent the enemy from crossing 
the Occoquan between Bull Run and the Broad Run, to fall 
upon our right flank while moving on Brentsville. This might 
be eflected by occupying Bacon Race Church and the cross- 
roads near the mouth of Bull Run, or still more effectually, by 
moving to the fords themselves, and preventing him from 
debouching on our side. 

These operations would probably be resisted, and it would 
require some time to effect them. As nearly, at the same 
time, as possible, we should gain the fords necessary to our 
purposes above Broad Run. Having secured our right flank, 
it would become necessary to carry Brentsville at any cost, for 
we could not leave it between our right flank and the main 
body. The final movement on the railroad must be deter- 
mined by circumstances existing at the time. 

This brief sketch brings out in bold relief the great advan- 
tage possessed by the enemy in the strong central position he 
occupies, with roads diverging in every direction, and a strong 
line of defence, enabling him to remain on the defensive with 



LIFE OP GEN. GEOEGE B. MoCLELLAN. 181 

a small force on one flank, while he concentrates everything 
on the other for a decisive action. 

Should we place a j^ortion of our force in front of Centre- 
ville, while the rest crosses the Occoquan, we commit the 
error of dividing our army by a very difficult obstacle, and by 
a distance too great to enable the two parts to support each 
other, should either be attacked by the masses of the enemy, 
while the other is held in check. 

I should, perhaps, have dwelt more decidedly on the fact 
that the force left near Sangsters must be allowed to remain 
somewhere on that side of the Occoquan until the decisive 
battle is over, so as to cover our retreat, in the event of disas- 
ter ; unless it should be decided to select and intrench a new 
base somewhere near Dumfries, a proceeding involving much 
time. 

After the passage of the Occoquan by the main army, this 
covering force could be drawn into a more central and less 
exposed position, say Brimstone Hill, or nearer the Occoquan. 

In this latitude the weather will, for a considerable period, 
be very uncertain, and a movement commenced in force, on 
roads in tolerably firm condition, will be liable, almost certain, 
to be much delayed by rains and snows. It will, therefore, be 
next to impossible to surprise the enemy, or take him at a 
disadvantage by rapid manceuvres. Our slow progress will 
enable him to divine our purposes, and take his measures ac- 
cordingly. The probability is, from the best information we 
possess, that the enemy has improved the roads leading to his 
lines of defence, while we will have to work as we advance. 

Bearing in mind what has been said, and the present unpre 
cedented and impassable condition of the roads, it will be evi 
dent that no precise period can be fixed upon for the move- 
ment on this line. "Nov can its duration be closely calculated; 
it seems certain that many weeks may elapse before it is pos- 
sible to commence the march. Assuming the success of this 
operation, and the defeat of the enemy as certain, the question 



182 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

at once arises as to the importance of the results gained. I 
think these results would be confined to the possession of the 
field of battle, the evacuation of the line of the upper Potomac 
by the enemy, and the moral efiect of the victory ; important 
results, it is true, but not decisive of the war, nor securing the 
destruction of the enemy's main army, for he could fall back 
upon other positions and fight us again and again, should the 
condition of his troops permit. If he is no condition to fight 
us again out of range of the intrenchments at Richmond, we 
would find it a very difficult and tedious matter to follow him 
np there, for he would destroy his railroad bridges, and other- 
wise impede our progress through a region where the roads 
are as bad as they well can be, and we would probably find 
ourselves forced at last to change the whole theatre of war, 
or to seek a shorter land route to Richmond, with a smaller 
available force, and at an expenditure of much more time than 
were we to adopt the short line at once. We would also have 
forced the enemy to concentrate his forces, and perfect his 
defensive measures at the very point where it is desirable to 
strike him when least prepared. 

" II. The second base of operations available for the army of 
the Potomac, is that of the lower Chesapeake Bay, which af- 
fords the shortest possible land route to Richmond, and strikes 
directly at the heart of the enemy's power in the east. 

" The roads in that region are passable at all seasons of the 
year. 

" The country now alluded to is much more favorable for 
offensive operations than that in front of Washington, (which 
is very unfavorable,) much more level, more cleared land, the 
woods less dense, the soil more sandy, the spring some two or 
three weeks earlier. A movement in force on that line obli- 
ges the enemy to abandon his intrenched position at Manasses, 
in order to hasten to cover Richmond and Norfolk. He must 
do this ; for should he permit us to occupy Richmond, his 
destruction can be averted only by entirely defeating us in a 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN.. 183 

battle, in which he must be the assailant. This movement, if 
successful, gives us the capital, the communications, the sup- 
plies of the rebels ; ISTorfolk would fall ; all the waters of the 
Chesapeake would be ours, all Virginia would be in our power ; 
and the enemy forced to abandon Tennessee and North Caro- 
lina. The alternative presented to the enemy would be to 
beat us in a position selected by ourselves ; disperse or '^ass 
beneath the Caudine Forks. 

" Should we be beaten in a battle, we have a perfectly se- 
cure retreat down the Peninsula upon Fort Monroe, with our 
flanks perfectly covered by the fleet. During the whole 
movement our flank is covered by the water, our right is se- 
cure, for the reason that the enemy is too distant to reach us 
in time ; he can only oppose us in front ; we bring our fleet in 
full play. 

*' After a successful battle, our position would be, Burnside 
forming our left, Norfolk held securely, our centre connecting 
Burnside with Buell, both by Raleigh and Lynchburg, Buell 
in Eastern Tennessee and Northern Alabama, Halleck at Nash- 
ville and Memphis. 

" The next movement would be to connect with Sherman on 
the left, by reducing Wilmington and Charleston ; to advance 
our centre into South Carolina and Georgia, to push Buell 
either towards Montgomery, or to unite with the main army 
in Georgia, to throw Halleck southward to meet the naval 
expedition from New Orleans. 

"We should then be in a condition to reduce at our leisure, 
all the southern seaports ; to occupy all the avenues of com- 
munication, to use the great outlet of the Mississippi ; to re- 
establish our government and arms in Arkansas, Louisiana and 
Texas ; to force the slaves to labor for our subsistence, instead 
of that of the rebels ; to bid defiance to all foreign interference. 
Such is the object I ever had in view ; this is the general plan 
which I hope to accomplish. 

" For many long months, I have labored to prepare the Array 



184 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

of the Potomac to play its part in the programme ; from the 
day when I was placed in command of all our armies, I have 
exerted myself to place all the other armies in such a condition, 
that they too could perform their allotted duties. 

" Should it be determined to operate from the lower Chesa- 
peake, the point of landing which promises the most brilliant 
results, is Urbanna, on the lower Rappahannock. This point is 
easily reached by vessels of heavy draught, it is neither occu- 
pied nor observed by the enemy, it is but one march from 
West Point, the key of that region, and thence but two 
marches to Richmond. A rapid movement from Urbanna, 
would probably cut off Magruder in the Peninsula, and enable 
us to occupy Richmond before it could be strongly reinforced. 
Should we fail in that, we could, with the co-operation of the 
navy, cross the James and show ourselves m rear of Richmond, 
thus forcing the enemy to come out and attack us, for his po- 
sition would be untenable, with us on the southern bank of the 
river. 

" Should circumstances render it not advisable to land at 
Urbanna, we can use Mob Jack Bay — or the worst coming to 
the worst, we can take Fort Monroe as a base, and operate 
with complete security, although with less celerity and bril- 
liancy of results, up the Peninsula. 

*' To reach whatever point may be selected as a base, a large 
amount of cheap water transportation must be collected, con- 
sisting mainly of canal-boats, barges, wood-boats, schooners, 
&c., towed by small steamers, all of a very different character 
from those required for all previous expeditions. This can 
certainly be accomplished within thirty days from the time the 
order is given. I propose as the best possible plan that can, 
in my judgment, be adopted, to select Urbanna as a landing- 
place for the first detachments. To transport by water four- 
divisions of infantry with their batteries, the regular infantry, 
a few wagons, one bridge train, and a few squadrons of caval- 
ry, making the vicinity of Hooker's position the place of em- 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 185 

barkation for as many as possible. To move the regular caval- 
ry and reserve artillery, the remaining bridge trains and wagons 
to a point somewhere near Cape Lookout, then ferry them over 
the river by means of North River ferry-boats, march them 
over to the Rappahannock (covering the movement by an in- 
fantry force near Heathsville) and to cross the Rappahannock 
in a similar way. The expense and difficulty of the movement 
will thus be very much diminished (a saving of transportation 
of about 10,000 horses) and the result none the less certain. 

" The concentration of the cavalry, <fcc., in the lower coun- 
ties of Maryland, can be effected without exciting suspicion, 
and the movement made without delay from that cause. 

" This movement, if adopted, will not at all expose the city 
of Washington to danger. 

" The total force to be thrown upon the new line would be, 
according to circumstances, from 110 to 140,000. I hope to 
use the latter number by bringing fresh troops into "Washing- 
ton, and still leaving it quite safe. I fully realize that in all 
projects offered, time will probably be the most valuable con- 
sideration. It is my decided opinion, that in that point of 
view, the second plan should be adopted. It is possible, nay, 
highly probable, that the weather and state of the roads, may 
be such as to delay the direct movement from Washington, 
with its unsatisfactory results and great risks — far beyond the 
time required to complete the second plan. In the first case 
we can fix no definite time for an advance. The roads have 
gone from bad to worse — nothing like their present condition 
has ever been known here before; they are impassable at 
present, we are entirely at the mercy of the weather. It is 
by no means certain that we C2m beat them at Manassas. On 
the other line, I regard success as certain by all the chances 
of war. We demoralize the enemy by forcing him to aban- 
don his prepared position for one which we have chosen, in 
which all is in our favor, and where success must produce im- 
mense results. 



186 LIFE OP GEN. GEOEGE B. MCLELLAN. 

" My judgment as a general, is clearly in favor of this pro, 
ject. Nothing is certain in war, but all the chances are in 
favor of this movement. So much am I in favor of the south- 
ern line of operations, that I would prefer the move from Fort 
Monroe as a base — as a certain though less brilliant move- 
ment, than that from Urbanna — to an attack upon Manassas. 

" I know that his excellency the President, you and I, all 
agree in our wishes, and that these wishes are to bring the war 
to a close, as promptly as the means in our possession will per- 
mit. I believe that the mass of the people have entire confi- 
dence in us. I am sure of it. Let us then look only to the 
great result to be accomplished, and disregard everything else. 
I am, very respectfully, your obedient servant, 

G. B. McClellan, 
Major-Ge^eral Commanding. 

General McClellan, in his Report, simply says of this letter : 
" It must have produced some effect upon the mind of the Pre- 
sident, since the execution of his order was not required, 
although it was not revoked as formally as it was issued." 

In his history of President Lincoln's administration, Mr. 
Raymond, better informed as to the secrets of the presidential 
mind, remarks : " The President was by no means convinced 
by General McClellan's reasoning : but in consequence of his 
steady resistance, and unwillingness to enter upon the execu- 
tion of any other plan, he assented to the submission of the 
matter to a council of twelve officers, late in February, at head- 
quarters." 

Dates are here witnesses of great importance : and these 
witnesses unfortunately fail to»bear out Mr. Lincoln's author- 
ized version of his own conduct in this great emergency. 

General McClellan's letter was read by the President on 
the 3d of February. As he had now declared himself com- 
mander-in-chief, it was the President's imperative duty to come 
to an immediate decision on the subject. To hesitate was a 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 187 

crime. The winter was slipping away. Already, by the 
President's orders, the execution of a part of General McClel- 
lan's plan of operations had been precipitated at the West. 
Why was the army of the Potomac to be kept waiting by Mr. 
Lincoln upon his decision ? Mr. Raymond's language conveys 
the impression that the President steadily postponed action 
until late in February, when he summoned a council of twelve 
officers to aid him in taking it. If this impression were strictly 
in consonance with the facts, it would still convict the Presi- 
dent of a weak and dangerous hesitation to impose his au- 
thority upon a subordinate of whose plans he disapproved. 

But the facts in the case are these : 

The President substantially acquiesced in General McClel- 
lan's conclusions, and thereby substantially authorized him to 
begin the campaign of the peninsula, early in February. To 
the purposes of this campaign it was essential that an extraor- 
dinary amount of water transportation should be provided on 
the Potomac, and no time ought to have been lost in procuring 
the vessels for this work. Already, early in January, before 
the President had superseded him. General McClellan, on leav- 
ing his sick-room, had summoned to Washington a gentleman 
well and widely known for his familiarity with the transporta- 
tion service of the country, and had consulted him as to the 
feasibility of obtaining a complete water transportation at one 
time for an army of 50,000 men, with horses, guns, and all the 
usual equipment of such a force. This gentleman, Mr. John 
Tucker, of Philadelphia — for a time assistant secretary of 
war — had reported a few days afterwards that the thing 
which the general had asked could certainly be done. 

In repeated interviews with the President, as well as with 
General McClellan, Mr. Tucker was consulted by both as to 
the shortest time in which thia transportation service could be 
got ready, and he had repeatedly assured them that thirty 
days at least would be required to complete the outfit. 

Upon the 27th of February, finally, no council of generals 



188 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

whatever having been held upon the matter^ the secretary of 
war^ by authority of the President^ instructed Mr. Tucker 
that the 'inovement of the army by water to the Peninsula was 
finally decided upon^ and required him at o?ice to procure the 
necessary steamers and sailing craft. 

It is plain, therefore, that the President, after yielding his 
assent to the proposed plan of campaign early in February, 
hesitated over the necessary preparations for it until the end 
of that month, and thereby interposed a delay of at Jeast 
three weeks in the movement. 

Let it here be stated that in the space of thirty-seven days 
from the 27th of February, Mr. Tucker, acting in concert with 
General McClellan, had chartered and assembled no fewer than 
113 steamers, 188 schooners, and 88 barges; and upon them 
had transported fi'om the Potomac to Fortress Monroe an 
army of 121,500 men, with 44 batteries, 74 ambulances, 1,150 
wagons, and 14,592 animals, besides pontoon bridges, tele- 
graph materials, and the enormous quantity of equipage re- 
quired for such a force. All this was done with the loss only 
of eight mules, and of nine barges, the cargoes of which were 
saved ; and Mr. Tucker is certainly warranted in his assertion, 
" that for economy and celerity of expedition this movement 
is without a parallel on record." 

A few days before the directions for procuring transporta- 
tion service were given to Mr. Tucker, General McClellan left 
Washington for Harper's Ferry, to take order in regard to 
affairs at that point. He returned on the 28th of February, 
and, upon the reiterated urgency of the President and the 
secretary of war, set about organizing an expedition against 
the Potomac batteries of the enemy ; although he did this with 
reluctance, for the reasons stated in the brief memorandum on 
the subject which has been giveji above. 

On the 8th of March, on which day a meeting of the Divi- 
sional Generals had been called by General McClellan at his 
headquarters, for the purpose of giving them their instructions 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 189 

in respect to this expedition against the batteries, the Presi- 
dent sent for him at a very early hour. His Excellency, to the 
great surprise of the General, renewed all his old objections to 
the plan of the movement against Richmond by water, — the 
plan which he had countermanded in January — to which he 
had assented again and again, throughout the month of Feb- 
ruary, and all the costly preparations for which were now, by 
his own order, in the full course of execution. Again General 
McClellan went over the whole question, and again the Presi- 
dent expressed himself as satisfied with the expedition. Learn- 
ing, however, that the divisional generals were to meet at 
General McClellan's headquarters that day, he urged it upon 
the general to submit the plan to them in council. 

All military precedents ruled against such a proceeding in a 
case so grave as that of the grand plan of a campaign of inva- 
sion. Without impugning the honor or the wisdom of any one 
of their number, a general-in-chief might well be excused for 
thinking the secret of such a plan safer in the hands of one 
general than of thirteen generals. 

The President, however, insisted. 

The meeting was held ; the plans of General McClellan were 
laid before the generals, and they were fully approved by seven 
out of the twelve generals present ; an eighth also giving them 
his conditional approbation. 

It is a curious circumstance that every one of the generals 
who upon this occasion voted by implication against the supe- 
riority of the President's plan of campaign, has, since that 
time, upon one or another pretext, been eliminated from the 
army of the Potomac, if not from the service. They were 
Generals W. F. Smith, Fitz-John Porter, Naglee, Franklin, 
McCall, Andrew Porter, and Blenker — men who certainly 
proved themselves, in the subsequent serious work of the war, 
not the least upon the rolls of Federal valor and conduct. 

Not less curious perhaps is it that the four generals who by 
implication countenanced the President's plan, were on the 



190 LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 

same day advanced by the President to the high distinction 
of commanders of army corps. These were Generals Mc- 
Dowell, Sumner, Heintzelman, and Keyes. 

For, having, at last, to use the language of Mr. Raymond, 
" consented to the submission " of General McClellan's plan 
to a council of twelve generals nearly a fortnight after he had 
himself given the final positive orders for carrying it into exe- 
cution, the President at once proceeded to take that plan 
entirely into his own hands ; and without consulting the com- 
mander who had conceived it, who was to carry it out on the 
field, and upon whom he intended to fix the entire responsi- 
bility of its results, he issued on this very day of its adoption 
by the council, two more war orders of the greatest import- 
ance in regard to it. 

The first of these orders directed the organization of the 
Army of the Potomac into four army corps, and appointed 
four generals to the new commands : the second revealed to 
the enemy and the world General McClellan's intention of 
moving the Army of the Potomac to a new base, and tied up 
the whole movement with restrictions fatal to the commanding 
general's freedom of action. 

Both of these orders demand particular attention. We be- 
gin with the second : 

Executive Mansion, 
Washington, March 8, 1863. 
Pbesident's General War Oedee, No. 3. 

Ordered: That no change of the bas6 of operations of the 
Army of the Potomac shall be made without leaving in and 
about "Washington such a force as, in the opinion of the gene- 
ral-in-chief, and the commanders of army corps, shall leave 
said city entirely secure. 

That no more than two army corps (about fifty thousand 
troops) of said army of the Potomac shall be moved en route 
for a new base of operations, until the navigation of the Po- 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 191 

tomac, from Washington to the Chesapeake Bay, shall be freed 
from the enemy's batteries and other obstructions, or until the 
President shall hereafter give express permission. 

That any movement, as aforesaid, en route for a new base of 
operations, which may be ordered by the general-in-chief, and 
which may be intended to move upon the Chesapeake Bay, 
shall begin to move upon the bay as early as the 18th of March, 
instant, and the general-in-chief shall be responsible that it so 
moves as early as that day. 

Ordered: That the army and navy co-operate in an imme- 
diate effort to capture the enemy's batteries upon the Potomac, 
between Washington and the Chesapeake Bay. 

Ab. Lincoln. 

L. Thomas, Adjt.-Gen. 

Upon this order it is to be remarked, that the clause holding 
General McClellan responsible that the movement on the bay 
should begin as early as the 18th of March was issued directly 
in the face of the facts which were perfectly well known to the 
President, though not to the public, that the assistant secre- 
tary of war, charged with procuring transportation for this 
movement, had stated it to be impossible to procure such trans- 
portation in less than thirty days' time, and that the said as- 
sistant secretary of war had never received permission from 
the President to begin the work of procuring such transporta- 
tion until the 2Vth of February. 

The clause of this order, therefore, can only be regarded as 
a deliberate attempt to make the general commanding the ex- 
pedition responsible before the country for a delay of which 
the President, who issued the order, kne^ himself, when he 
issued it, to have been the cause. 

But the whole order exposes its author to a still more formid- 
able imputation than is here implied. 

The Prince de JoinviUe, in commenting upon the submis 
sion by the President's orders of General McClellan's plans to 



192 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

a council of twelve, observes that on the " next day these plans 
were known to the enemy. Informed, no doubt, by one of 
those thousand female spies who keep up his communications 
into the domestic circles of the Federal enemy, Johnston evac- 
uated Manassas at once." It was dangerous, of course, to make 
the plans of the commanding general known to so many of 
his subordinate officers ; but the President's order, intimating 
the imminence of a movement of the Army of the Potomac 
by water to a new base, was such a sufficient notification of 
impending events, as abundantly to dispense General Johnston 
from an absolute reliance upon " female spies." 

The first presidential order issued on this fatal 8th day of 
March was in its way quite as significant to the enemy, and 
breathed a spirit quite as mischievous to the success of the 
Federal cause, as the one which we have considered. 

By this " General War Order, N'o. 2," the four most im- 
portant commands in the Army of the Potomac were given to 
generals not of General McClellan's selection ; and the enemy 
were informed that General Banks was to be intrusted with a 
separate fifth command of his own. 

General McClellan had never objected to the organization 
of the army into army corps, nor is there anything to show 
that if left to his own judgment, he might not have selected 
for such commands the officers named to them by the Presi- 
dent. 

But General McClellan had always insisted that the organi- 
zation of the army corps ought to be deferred "until some lit- 
tle experience in campaign, and on the field of battle, should 
show what general officers were most competent to exercise 
these high commands, for it must be remembered that we 
then had no officers whose experience in war on a large scale 
was sufficient to prove that they possessed the necessary quali- 
fications.* An incompetent commander of an army corps 

* See testimony of General McDowell, Keport on the Conduct of the 
War, Part II., p. 38. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 193 

might cause irreparable damage, while it was not probable that 
an incompetent division commander could cause any very se- 
rious mischief." 

In spite of these obviously sensible considerations, the 
President by his own motion, and without so much as hinting 
his intentions to the commander of the expedition, by this 
order suddenly broke up the Army of the Potomac into four 
great corps, putting at the head of these corps four generals, 
all of whom had expressed themselves unfavorably to the plan 
of campaign which they were thus clothed with the power 
vitally to forward or fatally to thwart ! The way in which 
these generals subsequently conducted themselves cannot be 
alleged here in extenuation of this worse than blunder on the 
part of the President and his counsellors. Their action put 
General McClellan and his enterprise practically at the mercy 
of four generals who could not command his full confidence, 
since they had pronounced unwise the plans which he himself 
believed to be the wisest he could adopt : it gave these gene- 
rals the dangerous consciousness of executive support against 
their military head ; and it therefore exposed them to all the 
temptations of jealousy, envy, and personal ambition. 

" It happens much more frequently than is supposed," says 
Baron Jomini,* " that a general-in-chief is deceived by his 
lieutenants, who, listening only to their egotism, forget that 
they betray not him alone, but their country and the army, 
through the influence of the lowest jealousy and the guiltiest 
ambition. The incapacity of a Heutenant, unable to conceive 
of the merits of a manoeuvre which has been ordered, and 
committing consequently grave mistakes in the execution of 
it, would have the same results as his envy or his jealousy in 
overthrowing the finest combinations." 

If General McClellan's plan of campaign was destined to 
escape such dangers as these, it was none the less exposed to 
them by the President's General War Order No. 2, which 

* Precis de VArt de la Guerre. Bruxelles, 1841. Tome 3d, p. 338. 



194 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

must therefore be set down as one of the most significant 
steps in the steady progress of the government towards the 
utter prostration of all the hopes which the country and Gen- 
eral McClellan had built up on the basis of that plan. 

And why, now, were these orders issued, in this untoward 
way, and at this most unpropitious moment ? 

In commenting upon the President's War Order, No. 1, 
issued January 27th, 1862, Mr. Lincoln's biographer, Mr. 
Raymond, makes this naive statement as to its origin : 

"As winter approached without any indications of an in- 
tended movement of our armies, the pubhc impatience rose to 
the highest point of discontent. The administration was every- 
where held responsible for these unaccountable delays, and 
was freely charged by its opponents with a design to protract 
the w^ar for selfish political purposes of its own ; and at the 
fall elections the public dissatisfaction made itself manifest by 
adverse votes in every considerable State where elections were 
held. 

"Unable longer to endure this state of things, President 
Lincoln put an end to it on the 27th of January, 1862, by issu- 
ing" his War Order, Ko. 1. 

It is not possible to add one word to the complete revelation 
which is here made of the President's willingness to sacrifice 
his armies and their generals to a fancied poUtical exigency. 
For what purpose was Mr. Lincoln clothed with the great 
powers of the presidency if not that he might interpose, those 
powers between an ignorant popular impatience and those 
faithful servants of the State to whom he himself but a few 
weeks before had solemnly pledged the " confidence, and his 
cordial support" necessary to their success in the execution of 
their vast plans for the public good ? 

What mattered the charges of the " opponents of the admin- 
istration ;" what the " adverse votes of every considerable State 
in the fall elections," in comparison with the tremendous issues 
of national life and national death dependent on the freedom 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 195 

of the commander of the national armies to perfect his plans 
and put them safely into execution ? 

How much of the " public dissatisfaction" which Mr. Lincoln 
thus found himself" unable to endure" arose from the delays of 
the army, and how much from the illegal, arbitrary, and violent 
conduct of the administration in civil matters, as well as from 
that general loss of confidence in the Republican party which 
was but the natural consequence of their failure to arrest the 
civil war, it is not perhaps worth while for us here to attempt 
to decide. The events of 1861 had certainly given the country 
abundant reasons for doubting the prescience of Mr. Seward, 
and with it the sagacity of the great party which looked up 
to him as its teacher, its founder, and its intellectual chief. 

As the President had issued his General War Order, No. 1, 
to check the flow of " adverse votes," so, under the incipient 
pressure of the joint committee on the conduct of the war, 
and of the new secretary of war, he issued his General War Or- 
ders, Nos. 2 and 3. 

In his History of President Lincoln's Administration, Mr. 
Kaymond gives us the following letter, " never before," as he 
says, " made public." The letter was addressed to General 
McClellan; and it is a striking illustration of the patience and 
forbearance with which General McClellan has adhered to the 
strictest standard of official propriety in all his publications on 
the subject of the war that this letter should first have seen 
the light through an oversight on the part of the friends of 
the writer, and not through any act of General McClellan or 
his friends. 

FoKTREss Monroe, May 9, 1863. 
My deae Sir, — ^I have just assisted the secretary of war 
in forming the part of a dispatch to you relating to army 
corps, which dispatch, of course, will have reached you long 
before this will. I wish to say a few words privately to you 
on this subject. I ordered the army corps organization not 



196 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

only on the unanimous opinion of the twelve generals of divi- 
sion^ hut also on the unanimous opinion of every military man 
I could get an opinion from^ and every modern military book^ 
yourself only excepted. Of course, I did not on my own 
judgment pretend to understand the subject. I now think it 
indispensable for you to knoio hoioyour struggle against it is 
received in quarters which we cannot entirely disregard. It 
is looked upon as merely an effort to pamper one or two pets, 
and to persecute and degrade their supposed rivals. I have 
had no word from Sumner, Seintzelman, or Keyes. The 
commanders of these corps are of course the three highest 
officers with you, but I am constantly told that you have no 
consultation or communication with them, that you consult 
and communicate with nobody but Fitz-John Porter, and per- 
haps General Franklin. I do not say these complaints are 
true or just; but, at all events, it is proper you should know 
of their existence. Do the commanders of corps disobey your 
orders in anything ? 

When you relieved General Hamilton of his command the 
other day you thereby lost the confidence of at least 07ie of 
your best friends in the senate. And here let me say, not as 
applicable to you personally, that senators and representatives 
speak of me in their places as they please without question ; 
and that officers of the army must cease addressing insulting 
letters to them for taking no greater liberty with them. But 
to return, are you strong enough, even with my help, to set 
your foot upon the neck of Sumner, Seintzelman, and Key es, 
all at once f This is a practical and very serious question 
for you. 

Yours truly, A. Lincoln. 

The entire absence throughout this letter of any conscious- 
ness that a general holding in his hands the lives of a hundred 
thousand brave men and the hope of a nation might perhaps 
regard with disgust and contempt such appeals, from his sense 



LIFE OP GEN. GIOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 197 

of what was best for his army and for his campaign to his 
concern about his personal popularity in " quarters which he 
could not entirely disregard," and to his fears of losing the 
confidence of his " friends in the senate," is highly noteworthy, 
and lets in a lamentable light upon the inner chambers of the 
history of this great war. 

But on the special question of the War Orders, Nos. 2 and 
3, the evidence of this letter is final and conclusive when taken 
in connection with the following passage from the Journal of 
the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War : 

"February 26, 1862. 

" Pursuant to previous arrangement, the committee waited 
upon the President at eight o'clock on Tuesday evening, Feb- 
ruary 25. They made known to the President that, having 
examined many of the highest miHtary ofiicers of the army, 
their statements of the necessity of dividing the great army 
of the Potomac into co7ys d^armee had impressed tlie commit- 
tee with the belief that it was essential that such a division of 
the army should be made — that it would be dangerous to 
move upon a formidable enemy with the present organization 
of the army. The application was enforced by many argu- 
ments drawn from the usages in France and every other mili- 
tary nation in Europe, and the fact that, so far as the commit- 
tee could learn, all our military officers agreed that our army 
would not be efficient unless such an organization was had. 

" The President observed that he had never considered the 
organization of the army into army corps so essential as the 
committee seemed to represent it to be; still he had long 
been in favor of such an organization. General McClellan, 
however, did not seem to think it so essential, though he had 
at times expressed himself as favorable to it. 

" The committee informed the President that the secretary 
of war had authorized them to say to him that he deemed 
such an organization necessary." 



198 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. MoCLELLAN. 

From all which it appears that the armies of the United 
States in general, and the Army of the Potomac in particular, 
were commanded on the 8th day of March, 1862, by the fol- 
lowing persons : 

Abraham Lincoln, President ; 

Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War ; 

BENjA:&nN F. Wade, ) ^ 

„ ^ \ Senators ; 

Zachaey Chandler, j 

and four members of the House of Representatives, making 

up, with these senators, a joint committee of Congress. 

It was under the auspices and the control of these six com- 
manders-in-chief, assisted by an Aulic council of senators, rep- 
resentatives, and military men, quite indefinite as to numbers, 
that the active commander in the field of the Army of the 
Potomac, Major-General McClellan, set out upon his expedi- 
tion for the capture of Richmond. 

" If such a council presumes not only to say to a general-in- 
chief that he is to march on Vienna or on Paris, but also how 
he is to manoeuvre and handle his army, the unfortunate gen- 
eral will be infallibly beaten, and the whole responsibility of 
his reverses will rest on those who at two hundred leagues* 
distance from the enemy pretend to direct an army which it 
is quite difficult enough to direct when one is actually in the 
field." * 

* Jomini. Frkis de VArt de la Guerre, tome ii. p. 47. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE AKMT OP THE POTOMAC IN MOTION. RETREAT OP JOHNSTON PROM 
MANASSAS. THE DEFENCE OP WASHINGTON, AND OP THE SHENAN- 
DOAH VALLEY. THE MOVEMENT TO THE PENINSULA. 

The 8th of March, 1862, was a notable day in the history 
of the war. 

On that day, as we have seen, the whole system of warfare, 
which General McClellan had been laboring so earnestly to 
perfect and put in operation, was shattered by two war orders 
of the President. 

On that day, also, the Federal ship of wax Jferrimac^ raised 
from the bottom of Norfolk harbor, where she had been sunk 
on the abandonment of that port to the enemy, and refitted 
by the Confederates for a new and terrible experiment in 
naval warfare, suddenly made her appearance in the waters of 
the lower James. 

She assailed the Federal fleet there lying, shattered and 
scattered the ships, and for the moment rode supreme over 
the mouths of the Chesapeake, threatening Fortress Monroe 
itself. 

The engagement which followed next day, between the 
Merrimac and the Monitor^ though it restored the prestige of 
the Federal navy, and secured the safety of Fortress Monroe, 
failed to recover for the North the control of the James River. 
General McClellan's plan of campaign thus received a serious 
blow. He could no longer count upon the James River, but 
must modify all his calculations upon the theory that the York 



200 LITE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

River alone was to make his line of water communications 
with his base at Fortress Monroe. 

On the 9th of March Johnston began to evacuate Manassas 
and Centreville. During the night of that day General McClel- 
lan ordered a general movement of the army towards the 
abandoned positions, less of course with the hope of being able 
to inflict any serious loss upon the enemy than in order to pre- 
pare the troops for their entry upon the great campaign before 
them. The observations which this movement enabled the 
general to make of the strength of the enemy's positions con- 
firmed him in the belief that an advance upon those positions 
during the winter would have been extremely dangerous to 
the untried army of the Union. He became satisfied also that 
these positions, strong as they were, had been held so long only 
in order that Johnston might ascertain distinctly from what 
quarter Richmond was likely to be menaced. General McClel- 
lan's own language on this subject has acquired a weight from 
the subsequent course of events which demands its reproduc- 
tion here : 

" New levies, that have never been in battle, cannot be ex- 
pected to advance without cover under the murderous fire 
from such defences, and carry them by assault. This is work 
in which veteran troops frequently falter, and are repulsed 
with loss. That an assault of the enemy's positions, in front 
of Washington, with the new troops composing the Army of 
the Potomac, during the winter of 1861-2, would have re. 
suited in defeat and demoralization, was too probable. The 
same army, though inured to war in many battles hardly 
fought, and bravely won, has thrice, under other generals, 
sufiered such disasters as it was no excess of prudence then to 
avoid. 

" My letter to the secretary of war, dated February 3d, 
1862, and given above, expressed the opinion that the move- 
ment to the Peninsula, would compel the enemy to retire from 
his position at Manassas, and free Washington from danger. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 201 

*' When the enemy first learned of that plan, they did thus 
evacuate Manassas. During the Peninsular campaign, as at 
no former period, northern Virginia was completely in our 
possession, and the vicinity of Washington free from the 
presence of the enemy. The ground so gained was not lost, 
nor Washington again put in danger, until the enemy learned 
of the orders for the evacuation of the Peninsula, sent to me 
at Harrison's Bar, and were again left free to advance north- 
ward, and menace the national capital. Perhaps no one now 
doubts that the best defence of Washington is a Peninsular 
attack on Richmond." 

While this movement on Centreville and Manassas was 
going on, another complete and formal change in the organi- 
zation of the army was made by the President ; the order 
making it, like all his preceding orders, being published with- 
out consultation with General McClellan, and coming this 
time to his knowledge through one of his aids-de-camp, who, 
having seen it in the National Intelligencer of March 12th, 
1862, telegraphed a copy of it to the general at Fairfax Court 
House. The order ran as follows : 

Executive Mansion, 
Washington, March 11, 1863- 

Pkesident's War Oedee, No. 3. 

Major-Gen eral McClellan, having personally taken the field 
at the head of the Army of the Potomac, until otherwise 
ordered ; he is relieved from the command of the other mili- 
tary departments, he retaining command of the Department 
of the Potomac. 

Ordered further^ That the departments now under the re- 
spective commands of Generals Halleck and Hunter, together 
with so much of that under General Buell as lies west of a 
north and south line indefinitely drawn through Knoxville, 
Tennessee, be consolidated and designated the Department of 



202 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

the Mississippi, and that, until otherwise ordered, Major-Gen- 
eral Halleck have command of said department. 

Ordered also^ That the country west of the Department of 
the Potomac, and east of the Department of the Mississippi, 
be a mihtary department, to be called the Mountain Depart- 
ment, and that the same be commanded by Major-General 
Fremont. 

That all the commanders of departments, after the receipt 
of this order by them, respectively report, severally and 
directly, to the secretary of war, and that prompt, full, 
and frequent reports will be expected of all and each of 
them. 

Abraham Lincoln. 

When it is remembered that the President had permitted 
General McClellan to "take the field" two days before this 
order was issued, without the slightest intimation that any 
such change in the organization of the army was contemplated, 
it would certainly seem to be unnecessary to look elsewhere 
than to the habitual state of mind of the chief executive of the 
nation for an adequate explanation of the " unaccountable de- 
lays," disappointments, and deceptions which have so unhap- 
pily marked the course of the war under Mr. Lincoln's admin- 
istration of affairs. 

General McClellan, under this new and peculiarly insulting 
blow, bore himself with the same quiet dignity which he had 
displayed during the trying weeks which preceded it, and to 
which the Prince de Joinville pays this eloquent tribute : — 

" As the day of action drew near, those who suspected the 
general's project, and were angry at not being informed of it, 
those whom his position had excited to envy, his political 
enemies, (and who in America is without them ?) in short all 
those who beneath him or beside him who wished him ill, 
broke out into a chorus of accusations of slowness, inaction, 
incapacity. McClellan, with a patriotic courage which I have 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 203 

always admired, disdained these accusations and made no re- 
ply. He satisfied himself with pursuing his preparations in 
laborious silence." 

He now addressed a brief note to the President, in which he 
used these words : — 

" I believe I said to you some weeks since, in connection 
with some Western matters, that no feeling of self-interest or 
ambition should ever prevent me from devoting myself to the 
service. I am glad to have the opportunity to prove it, and 
you will find that under present circumstances I shall work 
just as cheerfully as before, and that no consideration of self 
will in any manner interfere with the discharge of my public 
duties." 

The premature disclosure of General McClellan's plans, pre- 
cipitating the retreat of General Johnston, had made all notion 
of any effective pursuit at that season of the year, through the 
always impracticable country about Washington and Manassas 
Junction, absurd. The Prince de Joinville gives a graphic 
picture of the fearful condition of the roads over which, on the 
14th of March, General Stoneman, with a reconnoitering force, 
attempted to follow up the retiring enemy.* Stoneman found 
" the railroad bridges all burned down to Warrenton Junction, 
saw two regiments of cavalry and three bodies of infantry on 
the other side of Cedar Run ; had we crossed we should "not 
have been able to get back for high water." 

All the energies of General McClellan were now concentrat- 
ed on the expedition to the Peninsula. Some of the elements 
most important to the success of that expedition, as we have 
seen, had already been eliminated from the calculation by the 

* General Bell, (Major-General Bell, R. A., who commanded the 
Royals in the Crimea,) went round the works with General McClellan, 
and expressed his opinion that it would be impossible to fight a great 
battle in the country which lay between the two armies — in fact, as he 
said, " a general could no more handle his troops among those woods 
than he could regulate the movements of rabbits in a cover." — TT. H, 
BusseU. My Dia/ry North and South, Vol. II., p. 349, English edition. 



204 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

action of the President and his counsellors, and it was omi- 
nously doubtful whether the navy department, which had never 
been able to clear the Potomac of the enemy's batteries, would 
be able to fulfil its promise of neutralizing the Merrimac and 
opening the James River to the expedition. Mr. Assistant 
Secretary Tucker, however, was vigorously pushing forward 
the transportation service, and much might still be done if but 
an ordinary dependence could be placed upon the good faith 
and the intelligence of the government. 

A council of generals was held at Fairfax Court House 
March 13th, at which it was agreed that if the Merrimac 
could be neutrahzed and the transportation service speedily 
put in readiness, the operations against Kichmond from the 
base of Fortress Monroe should at once be commenced. 

The proceedings' of this council were submitted to the new 
commander-in-chief, the President, by whom they were ap- 
proved, upon condition that "Washington should be made 
entirely safe, and Manassas Junction occupied in sufficient 
force to prevent the return of the rebels ;" the said rebels, as 
General Stoneman had discovered, having burned the railroad 
bridges, by the help of which they might have returned to 
Manassas Junction had they been so minded. 

Manassas was occupied for the time by a part of General 
Sumner's corps, and before this force was relieved at the end 
of March the reconnoissances of its commander had revealed 
the fact that the Rappahannock bridge had been blown up by 
the rebels, and the line of the Rappahannock and Manassas 
Gap Railway thus left secure from any important menace by 
the enemy. 

On the 16 th of March General McClellan issued his instruc- 
tions to General Banks for holding Manassas Junction and 
covering the line of the Potomac River and Washington. 

A force of the enemy under General Stonewall Jackson, 
which had occupied Winchester at the time of the evacuation 
of Manassas, fell back before the advance of General Banks's 



LIFE OF GENT. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 205 

troops, and pursued by General Shields, had retreated, by the 
19th of March, to a point twenty miles south of Strasburg. 
In accordance with General McClellan's instructions of the 
16th, General Banks concentrated on Manassas; Jackson re- 
turned upon his steps, and on the 23rd suffered a severe defeat 
at Winchester, after which he made the best of his way south- 
ward again. Had the instructions given to General Banks and 
Colonel Alexander, of the engineers, by General McClellan 
been followed out after this, not only would Manassas have 
been placed in such a condition for defence as to have pre- 
vented General Pope's disaster of August, 1862, but the 
Union forces would probably have been enabled to hold the 
Shenandoah country completely clear of the enemy. How 
it came to pass that they were not so followed out we shall 
presently see. The defences of Washington were committed 
to Brigadier-General Wadsworth. 

The true defence of Washington, as General McClellan 
maintained, and as the subsequent course of events has abun- 
dantly proved lay in the energetic and successful prosecution of 
the expedition against Richmond. Washington had been sur- 
rounded, during the summer and autumn of 1861, with nume- 
rous and strong fortifications. It had become, indeed, a forti- 
fied capital, such a capital as Napoleon declared could always 
be defended with a force of 50,000 men against an attack by 
an army of 300,000 men, or by a force, that is, standing to the 
assailants in the proportion of one to. six. 

For the immediate garrison of Washington General McClel- 
lan provided a force of 18,000 men with 32 guns.* As the 
strongest force of the enemy which ever made its appearance 
in Northern Virginia during the Peninsula campaign, was 
General Jackson's movable column of, at the most, 20,000 
men ; and as the forces left by General McClellan in the She- 
nandoah and at Maryland amounted to between 50 and 60,000 

* Report of General Barry, Chief of Artillery, contradicting statement 
of Hon. Z. Chandler, in the United States Senate. 



206 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

men, with more than 70 guns, it would seem that the Presi- 
dent's anxiety in regard to the safety of Washington might 
well have been laid to rest. 

So in fact it seemed to be until after General McClellan had 
taken his departure for the Peninsula, when it blazed up anew 
and with fatal consequences to the cause and army of the 
Union. 

On the 1st of April, 1862, General McClellan embarked, 
with his headquarters, at Alexandria, and reached Fortress 
Monroe the next day. 

A few days before his embarkation. General McClellan had 
met the President by appointment, and had been informed by 
him that a strong " pressure" had been brought to bear at 
Washington to procure the detachment of General Blenker's 
division of 10,000 men from the Army of the Potomac, in 
order that it might be attached to the department of General 
Fremont. " His excellency was good enough," says General 
McClellan, " to suggest several reasons for not taking Blenk- 
er's division from me." I assented to the force of his sugges- 
tions, and was extremely gratified by his decision to allow the 
division to remain with the Army of the Potomac." The com- 
mand in the Shenandoah Yalley, however, was however now 
given to General Fremont, who thus became responsible for 
the fortunes of the startling campaign shortly afterwards car- 
ried on against the Union troops in that region by General 
Stonewall Jackson. 

On the very day before he left Alexandria the following 
note was handed to General McClellan : 

Executive Mansion, 
Washington, March 31, 1862. 
Major-General McClellan. 

My Dear Sir : — This morning I felt constrained to order 
Blenker's division to Fremont ; and I write this to assure you 
that I did po with great pain, understanding that you would 
wish it otherwise. If you could know the full pressure of the 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 207 

case^ 1 am confident you would justify it, even beyond a mere 
acknowledgment, that the commander-in-chief may order what 
he pleases. 

Yours, very truly, / A. Lincoln. 

To this imperial statement of the " master of all the legions" 
of the Union what reply could be made ? 

" I answered in substance," observes General McClellan, " that 
I regretted the order, and could ill-afford to lose 10,000 troops, 
which had been counted upon in forming my plan of cam- 
paign, but as there was no remedy I would yield, and do the 
best I could without them. In a conversation with the Presi- 
dent a few hours afterwards, I repeated verbally the same 
thing, and, expressed my regret that Blenker's division had 
been given to Fremont, from any ' pressure' other than the 
requirements of the national exigency. I was partially relieved, 
however, by the President's positive and emphatic assurance 
that I might leave, confident that no more troops beyond 
these 10,000 should, in any event, be taken from me, or in any 
way detached from my command." 

This was on the 31st of March. 

On the night of the 3d of April a telegram from the adju- 
tant-general reached General McClellan, at Fortress Monroe, 
to inform him that, "by order of the President," he was 
deprived of all control over General Wool and his division of 
10,000 men at Fortress Monroe, and its dependencies. Besides 
the reduction of force entailed by this order, it took away 
from General McClellan the command of his own base of 
operations. 

"Of the causes which led to this order," says General 
McClellan in his report, " I am to this day ignorant," and as 
not even Mr. Lincoln's biographer has thought it best to 
throw any light upon them, the student of this extraordinay 
history is left to conjectures which can hardly lead him very 
far wrong. 



208 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

One immediate and most disastrous result of this act of the 
" commander-in-chief who could order what he pleased," was 
to deprive the Army of the Potomac of all accurate and 
authoritative means of information as to the enemy in its front, 
their force and their positions. General McClellan could 
obtain no maps ; he learned that General Magruder held 
Yorktown, But with how many troops General Wool could 
not pretend to say. 

In the ]^ew-York Times of April 5th, 1862, General Wool 
is made to telegraph to the war department, " The Army of 
the Potomac will not find many rebels to fight in its front." 

In the same journal of April 6th, 1862, General Wool is 
made to telegraph, that General Magruder " has 30,000 men.'' 

Nothing was known at Fortress Monroe of the formidable 
lines of the enemy across the Warwick River. 

Reconnoissances were pushed forward at once, and the ad- 
vance began on the 4th of April. The roads were in a terrible 
state. On reaching Lee's Mills, which he had been instructed 
to carry. General Keyes discovered the strength of the posi- 
tions on the Warwick, found they could not be carried, and 
was brought to a stand. 

Almost at this moment the following telegram reached 
General McClellan : 

Adjutant-General's Office, 
April 4th, 1862. 
Gen. McClellan: — 

By direction of the President, General McDowell's army 
corps has been detached from the force under your immediate 
command ; and the general is ordered to report to the secre- 
tary of war ; letter by mail. 

L. Thomas, 

Adj't-Gen. 

A new department, that of the Rappahannock, had been cre- 
ated for General McDowell ! 



LIFE Of gen. GEOEGE B. MoCLELLAN. 209 

The following are General McClellan's comments upon an 
order which paralyzed all his operations at their very outset, 
and, as the Prince de Joinville very justly says, converted a 
brilliant and rapid movement into a long, wary and wearying 
advance : 

^ " The President, having promised in our interview following 
his order of March 31st, withdrawing Blenker's division of 
10,000 men from my command, that nothing of the sort should 
be repeated, that I might rest assured that the campaign 
should proceed with no further deductions from the force upon 
which its operations had been planned, I may confess to hav- 
ing been shocked at this order, which, with that of the 31st 
ult., removed nearly 60,000 men from my command, and re- 
duced my force by more than one-third after its task had been 
assigned, its operations planned, its fighting begun. To me 
the blow was most discouraging. It frustrated all my plans 
for impending operations. It fell when I was too deeply com- 
mitted to withdraw. It left me incapable of continuing opera- 
tions which had been begun. It compelled the adoption of 
another, a different, and a less effective plan of campaign. It 
made rapid and brilliant operations impossible. It was a fatal 
error." 

The duty to which the magnificent corps of McDowell had 
been assigned was to turn Yorktown by West Point on the 
York River. This operation had now to be abandoned, and, 
through a tangled wilderness, traversed by countless streams, 
while the rains incessantly fell, and storms of wind detained 
the transports in Hampton Roads, the army had to feel its 
way blindly forward against the front of the enemy's positions. 

In what light those who were near the headquarters of his 
excellency the commander-in-chief, who had the best oppor- 
tunities for knowing the truth, and who had no motives for 
misrepresenting the spirit of the " pressure" under which he 
thus inflicted upon General McClellan this persistent and fatal 



210 LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

interference with his plans, viewed the matter, we may learn 
from the journals of the time. 

General McClellan in his Report tells us that — 

" The council, composed of four corps commanders, organ- 
ized by the President of the United States, at its meeting on 
the 13th March, adopted Fort Monroe as the base of opera- 
tions for the movement of the Army of the Potomac upon 
Richmond. 

"For the prompt and successful execution of the projected 
operation, it was regarded by all as necessary that the whole 
of the four corps should be employed, with at least the addi- 
tion of ten thousand men drawn from the forces in the vicinity 
of Fortress Monroe : that position and its dependencies being 
regarded as amply protected by the naval force in its neigh- 
borhood, and the' advance of the main army up the Peninsula, 
so that it could be safely left with a small garrison." 

The President having thus been clearly informed, not merely 
by General McClellan, but by the four corps commanders 
whom he had himself selected from among the divisional gen- 
erals for promotion, that "for the prompt and successful exe- 
cution of the projected operation," it was necessary that the 
whole of the four corps commanded by these officers, with at 
least ten thousand additional men from Fortress Monroe, 
should be employed, how did it come to pass not only that one 
of these corps, and that the strongest of them, was withdrawn 
bodily from General McClellan's expedition, but that the gen- 
eral commanding it was nominated to the command of a new 
and independent department created expressly for him ? To 
withdraw nearly one-third of the force " necessary" for the 
prompt and successful execution of a great military movement, 
was for the President to take upon himself the toi'rible respon- 
sibility of the failure of that movement. Ignorant as the 
President was of all military matters, and surrounded by coun- 
sellors no more enlightened than himself, some dim sense of 
this formidable truth, one would suppose, might have dawned 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 211 

upon his mind. By what influence was the healing ray ob- 
scured ? 

" The order creating a new department for General Irwin 
McDowell," says the well-informed New York Times of April 
7th, 1862, " is but the culmination of a long cherished plan of 
the progressive Republicans." 

In other words, the President of the United States delibe- 
rately assumed the dread responsibility of ruining the most 
important campaign of the most important army of the nation, 
for the sake of propitiating the " progressive" and impatient 
and annoying members of his own political party. This was 
so distinctly understood at the time in Washington, that it was 
the subject of public as well as private conversation ; and the 
following extract from the New York Times of April 6th, 
1862, will show the pleasant and humorous light in which the 
triflins: of a commander-in-chief who could " direct whatever 
he pleased," and of " progressive Kepublicans" who could con- 
trol the commander-in-chief, with the lives of soldiers, the 
honor of their generals and the hopes of the nation, was re- 
garded by those who were at home behind the political scenes : 

" It looks now very much as though the two Macs had been 

pitted against each other, and it would be a good joke, after all, 

if Banks's dashing movement down the valley should frighten 

the rebels out of Gordonsville and drive them precipitately out 

of Virginia, thus cheating both Macs out of a fight." * 

* The language here used is much more significant than any more 
labored and serious statement would have been of the true motives and 
feelings of the persons then dominant at Washington. It is curiously 
reinforced by the observations of a foreign officer of the highest charac- 
ter, of whose notes on the campaign of the Peninsula I have made free 
use. Colonel Lecomte declares that the Report of the Joint Committee 
" entirely perverts the facts relative to Jackson's campaign, and the in- 
tense terror which it inspired in Washington, which was the true cause 
of the failure on the Peninsula. On quitting Washington, before hav- 
ing been deprived of a part of his command. General McClellan had 
given the most exact and judicious instructions for the defence of the 
capital. He had pointed out Manassas and Front Royal as points form- 
ing a good advanced line, and had ordered Banks to intrench himself 



212 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

While the administration and its friends at Washington 
were taking these jocose views of war, its responsibilities and 
its conditions, General McClellan at Fortress Monroe was ear- 
nestly endeavoring to ascertain the truth in regard to the rebel 
forces before him, resolved to do his best. 
His task was not a light one. 

The Merrimac, which the President had promised him should 
be neutralized by the navy, he found still so far mistress of the 
James River that the naval forces at Hampton Roads were en- 
tirely unable to assist the army in the reduction of the water 
batteries of Yorktown and Gloucester. His engineers under 
General Barnard reported the strength of the enemy's lines to 
be so great that it would be impracticable to break them, and 
too hazardous to attempt to carry them by assault. 

In short, the commander of the Army of Potomac found 
himself in the position of Lord Raglan and Marshal St. Ar- 
naud before Sebastopol, but with a relatively stronger enemy 
in his front,* and with no such " confidence" and " cordial sup- 
there, distinctly forbidding him to advance further into Virginia. But 
as soon as General McClellan's back was turned they wished to make* 
Banks a rival of him, and, supposing that the Army of the Potomac 
would attract all the force of the enemy, it was thought that Banks 
might gather some cheap laurels if he were sent into the upper vaUey 
of tJie Shenandoah. The Aulic Council at Washington thought they 
might in this way strike a master-stroke and cause Richmond to fall he- 
fore McClellan had time to appear before it. * * ^ 

" Jackson might have moved between Warrenton Junction and Win- 
chester ; he might have pushed cavalry detachments into Western Ma- 
ryland ; but he could have attempted no serious enterprise. Instead 
of this it was thought that a good trick might be played upon Jackson, 
and that he might be " bagged," to use an American expression. To 
form a notion of this plan of the campaign manufactured at Washing- 
ton, and of the confusion which attended its execution, one should read 
the series of telegrams by which the President informs General McClel- 
lan of the progress of this wise manoeuvre." — Translation in Millard's 
Life of McClellan, p. 219. 

* The fact that General Magruder reports himself to have held York- 
town, on the first appearance of General McClellan's army, with a force 
of but eight or ten thousand men, is often most absurdly and unjustly 
cited as proof that the Army of the Potomac was detained before that 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 213 

« 

port" in his rear as the Duke of Newcastle and Napoleon III. 
gave to the allied armies. 

All the conditions of the position in Virginia, indeed, were 
now become, through the course of the President and his 
counsellors, so completely different from those upon which 
General McClellan had been officially led to count, that his 
whole plan of campaign was now to be recast in the face of 
the enemy. 

The new situation cannot be more fairly stated than it is in 
the following letter, written at the time by General Keyes, 
one of the officers appointed by the President himself to the 
command of an army corps : 

Headquaeteks 4th Corps, 
Warwick Court House, Va., April 7, 1863. 
Mt Dear Senator, — 

The- plan of campaign on this line was made with the dis- 
tinct understanding that four army corps should be employed, 
and that the navy should co-operate in the taking of York- 
town, and also (as I understood it) support us on our left by 
moving gunboats up James River. 

To-day I have learned that the 1st Corps, which, by the 
President's order, was to embrace four divisions, and one divi- 
sion (Blenker's) of the 2d Corps, have been withdrawn alto- 
gether from this line of operations, and from the Army of the 
Potomac. At the same time, as I am informed, the navy has 
not means to attack Yorktown, and is afraid to send gunboats 
up James River for fear of the Merrimac. 

The above plan of campaign was adopted unanimously by 
General McDowell and Brigadier-Generals Sumner, Heintzel- 

place by a handful of men. Connected with Kichmond directly by rail, 
Yorktown was practically held by the whole army of Johnston, so long 
as Johnston chose to hold it. He chose to hold it so long as it should 
be tenable without a battle. When the batteries of General McClellan 
compelled him to abandon it, he abandoned all the intervening coun- 
try between Yorktown and Richmond, and gave the latter city up to be 



214 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

man andKeyes,* and was concurred in by Major-General Mc- 
Clellan, who first proposed Urbanna as our base. 

This army being reduced by forty-five thousand troops, 
some of them among the best in the service, and without the 
support of the navy, the plan to which we are reduced bears 
scarcely any resemblance to the one I voted for. 

I command the James River column, and I left my camp, 
near !N"ewport !N'ews, the morning of the 4th instant. I only 
succeeded in getting my artillery ashore the afternoon of the 
day before, and one of my divisions had not all arrived in 
camp the day I left, and, for the want of transportation, has 
not yet joined me. So you will observe that not a day was 
lost in the advance ; and in fact we marched so quickly and 
so rapidly that many of our animals were twenty-four and 
forty-eight hours without a ration of forage. But, notwith- 
standing the rapidity of our advance, we are stopped by a line 
of defence nine or ten miles long, strongly fortified by breast- 
works, erected nearly the whole distance, behind a stream or 
succession of ponds nowhere fordable, one terminus being 
Torktown and the other ending in the James River, which is 
commanded by the enemy's gunboats. Yorktown is fortified 
all around with bastioned works, and on the water side, it and 
Gloucester are so strong that the navy are afraid to attack 
either. 

The approaches on our side are generally through low, 
swampy, or thickly wooded ground, over roads which we are 
obliged to repair or to make, before we can get forward our 
carriages. The enemy is in great force, and is constantly re- 
ceiving reinforcements from the two rivers. The line in front 
of us is therefore one of the strongest ever opposed to an in- 
vading force in any ountry. 

You will then ask, why I advocated such a line for our ope- 
rations ? My reasons are few, but, I think, good. 

* General Keyes, it will be understood, is referring here to tlie action 
of the council held after the evacuation of Manassas by Johnston. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 215 

With proper assistance from the navy, we could take York- 
town, and then, with gunboats on both rivers, we could beat 
any force opposed to us on Warwick River, because the shot 
and shells from the gunboats would nearly overlap across the 
Peninsula, so that, if the enemy should retreat, and retreat he 
must, he would have a long way to go without rail or steam 
transportation, and every soul of his army must fall into our 
hands or be destroyed. 

Another reason for my supporting the new base and plan 
was, that this line, it was expected, would furnish water trans- 
portation nearly to Richmond. 

Now, supposing we succeed in breaking through the line in 
front of us, what can we do next ? The roads are very bad, 
and if the enemy retains command of James River, and we 
do not first reduce Yorktown, it would be impossible for us to 
subsist this army three marches beyond where it is now. As 
the roads are at present, it is with the utmost difficulty that 
we can subsist it in the position it now occupies. 

You will see, therefore, by what I have said, that the force 
originally intended for the capture of Richmond should be all 
sent forward. If I thought the four army corps necessary 
when I supposed the navy would co-operate, and when I 
judged of the obstacles to be encountered by what I learned 
from maps and the opinions of officers long stationed at Fort 
Monroe, aijid from all other sources, how much more should I 
think the full complement of troops requisite, now that the 
navy cannot co-operate, and now that the strength of the ene- 
my's lines and the number of his guns and men prove to be 
almost immeasurably greater than I had been led to expect ! 

The line in front of us, in the opinion of all the military men 
here who are at all competent to judge, is one of the strongest 
in the world, and the force of the enemy capable of being in- 
creased beyond the numbers we now have to oppose to him. 
Independently of the strength of the lines in front of us, and 
of the force of the enemy behind them, we cannot advance 



216 LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 

until we get command of either York River or James River. 
The efficient co-operation of the navy is, therefore, absolutely 
essential, and so I considered it when I voted to change our 
base from the Potomac to Fort Monroe. 

An iron-clad boat must attack Yorktown, and if several 
strong gunboats could be sent up James River also, our suc- 
cess will be certain and complete, and the rebellion will soon 
be put down. 

On the other hand, we must butt against the enemy's works 
with heavy artillery and a great waste of time, hfe, and mate- 
rial. 

If we break through and advance, both our flanks will be 
assailed from two great water-courses in the hands of the 
enemy ; our supplies would give out, and the enemy, equal, 
if not superior iu numbers, would, with the other advantages, 
beat and itestroy this army. 

The greatest master of the art of war has said that " if you 
would invade a country successfully, you must have 07ie line 
of operations and one army, under one general." But what 
is our condition ? The State of Virginia is made to constitute 
the command, in part or wholly, of some six generals, viz. : 
Fremont, Banks, McDowell, Wool, Burnside, and McCleHan, 
besides the scrap, over the Chesapeake, in the care of Dix. 

The great battle of the war is to come off here. If we win 
it, the rebeUion will be crushed. K we lose it^ the conse- 
quences will be more horrible than I care to foretell. The 
plan of campaign I voted for, if carried out with the means 
proposed, will certainly succeed. If any part of the means 
proposed are withheld or diverted, I deem it due to myself to 
say that our success will be uncertain. 

It is no doubt agreeable to the commander of the First 
Corps to have a separate department, and, as this letter advo- 
cates his return to General McClellan's command, it is proper 
to state that I am not at all influenced by personal regard or 
dislike to any of my seniors in rank. If I were to credit all 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLA^N. 217 

the opinions which have been poured into my cars, I must be- 
lieve that, in regard to my present fine command, I owe much 
to General McDowell and nothing to General McClellan. But 
I have disregarded all such officiousness, and I have, from last 
July to the present day, supported General McClellan and 
obeyed all his orders with as hearty a good will afs though he 
had been my brother or the friend to whom I owed most. I 
shall continue to do so to the last, and so long as he is my 
commander, and I am not desirous to displace him, and would 
not if I could. He left Washington with the understanding 
that he was to execute a definite plan of campaign with cer- 
tain prescribed means. The plan was good and the means 
sufficient, and, without modification, the enterprise was certain 
of success. But, with the reduction of force and means, the 
plan is entirely changed, and is now a bad plan, with means 
insufficient for certain success. 

Do not look upon this communication as the oflTspring of 
despondency. I never despond ; and when you see me work- 
ing the hardest, you may be sure that fortune is frowning upon 
me. I am working noic^ to my utmost. 

Please show this letter to the President, and I should like 
also that Mr. Stanton should know its contents. Do me the 
honor to write to me as soon as you can, and beheve me, with 
perfect respect. 

Your most obedient servant, 

E. D. Keyes, 
Brig.-Gen. Comd'g Fourth Army Corps. 
Hon. Iea Harris, 
U. S. Senate. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE SIEGE OF YOKKTOWN. EETKEAT OP THE CONFEDERATES UPON 
RICHMOND. EVACUATION OF NORFOLK AND DESTRUCTION OF THE 
MERRIMAC. THE BATTLE OF WELLTAMSBURGH, AND ADVANCE TO 
THE CHICKAHOMINY. 

The reports of General Barnard and of General Keyes 
having made it necessary now to open regular approaches 
against the defences of Yorktown, the work was at once 
begun and vigorously pushed forward. 

His excellency, the commander-in-chief, however, contem- 
plating the situation by telegraph from Washington, suggested 
a shorter method of dealing with the enemy. On the 6th of 
April he telegraphed to General McClellan : 

" You now have over one hundred thousand troops with 
you, independent of General Wool's command. I think you 
had better break the enemy'' s line from Yorktown to Warioick 
River at once. This will probably use time as advantageous- 
ly as you can. 

" A^iNCOLN, President." 

" The enemy's field-works," says General Barnard, Chief of 
Engineers, in his report, " are far more extensive than may be 
supposed from the mention of them I make ; and every kind 
of obstruction which the country affords, such as abattis, 
marsh, inundation, was skillfully used. The litie is certainly 
one of the most extensive known to modern times. 

" The country on both sides the Warwick, from near York- 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 219 

town down, is a dense forest, with few clearings. It was 
swampy, and the roads impassable during the heavy rains we 
have constantly had, except where our own labors had cor- 
duroyed them. If we could have broken the enemy's line 
across the isthmus, we could have invested Yorktown, and it 
must, with its garrison, have soon fallen into our hands. It 
was not deemed practicable, considering the strength of that 
line, and the difficulty of handling our forces, (owing to the 
impracticable character of the country,) to do so. If we could 
take Yorktown, or drive the enemy out of that place, the ene- 
my's line was no longer tenable. This we could do by siege 
operations. It was deemed too hazardous to attempt the re- 
duction of the place by assault." 

This was the deliberate opinion of the chief of engineers of 
the Army of the Potomac, given at the time. In a subsequent 
report* the same officer, General Barnard, retracts this opinion, 
and remarks, " My opinion now is that the lines of Yorktown 
should have been assaulted." This palinode has been quoted 
with approbation by the committee on the conduct of the 
war. It is quoted also, but not by any means with approba- 
tion, by Colonel Lecomte, of the Swiss army, who served 
through the Peninsular campaign on the staff of the Army of 
the Potomac, and who has since published in Paris a con- 
densed translation of the Report of the Committee on the Con- 
duct of the War, illustrated with notes by himself. This pro- 
fessional soldier observes: "We are the more astonished at 
this retrospective confidence of General Barnard because we 
believe that the engineers who were with him, and he himself, 
repeatedly expressed very different opinions on the spot." 

It is unnecessary to add that the opinions of General Bar- 
nard, "given on the spot," were the only opinions then of 
value, or even accessible to General McClellan, whose duty it 
was, as commander-in-chief, to be guided by those opinions, 

* Army of the Potomac. Engineers and ArtiUery. Barnard and 
Barry. New York : Van Nostrand, 1863. 



220 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

formed, as it was to be presumed, by General Barnard, after a 
proper examination of the enemy's works, and expressed with 
a conscientious sense of his grave responsibility. 

Kemembering that the lives of thousands of his soldiers as 
well as " time" must certainly be " used" in trying to " break" 
this impracticable line, and reposing more confidence in the 
opinions of his own generals, given from observations taken 
on the spot, than in the inspirations of the President at Wash- 
ington, General McClellan resolved to take Yorktown by a 
siege. 

To take this resolution required not a little moral courage, 
in the face of the following letter from a commander-in-chief 
who " could order whatever he pleased," and who had already 
at so many critical moments flung the weight of his imperial 
will, borne down by an " outside pressure," into the scale of 
the enemy's force. 

Washington, April 9, 1863. 
Major-Geneeal McClellan: 

My deae Sie, — Your dispatches, complaining that you are 
not properly sustained, while they do not ofiend me, do pain 
me very much. 

Blenker's division was withdrawn from you before you left 
here, and you know the pressure under which I did it, and, as 
I thought, acquiesced in it, certainly not without reluctance. 

After you left I ascertained that less than twenty thousand 
unorganized men, without a single field-battery, were all you 
designed to be left for the defence of Washington and Manas- 
sas Junction ; and part of this even was to go to General 
Hooker's old position. General Banks' corps, once designed 
for Manassas Junction, was diverted and tied up on the line 
of Winchester and Strasburg, and could not leave it without 
again exposing the upper Potomac, and the Baltimore and 
Ohio Railroad. This presented (or would present, when 
McDowell and Sumner should be gone) a great temptation to 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 221 

the enemy to turn back from the Rappahannock and sack 
Washington. My explicit order that Washington should, by 
the judgment of all the commanders of army corps, be left 
entirely secure, had been neglected. It was precisely this that 
drove me to detain McDowell. 

I do not forget that I was satisfied with your arrangement 
to leave Banks at Manassas Junction ; but when that arrange- 
ment was broken up and nothing was substituted for it, of 
course I was constrained to substitute something for it myself. 
And allow me to ask, Do you really think I should permit the 
line from Richmond via Manassas Junction to this city to be 
entirely open, except what resistance could be presented by 
twenty thousand unorganized troops? This is a question 
which the country will not allow me to evade. 

There is a curious mystery about the numbers of the troops 
now with you. When I telegraphed you on the 6th, saying 
you had over a hundred thousand with you, I had just obtained 
from the secretary of war a statement, taken, as he said, from 
your own returns, making one hundred and eight thousand 
then with you and en route to you. You now say you will 
have but eighty-five thousand when all en route to you shall 
have reached you. How can the discrepancy of twenty-three 
thousand be accounted for ? 

As to General Wool's command, I understand it is doing 
for you precisely what a like number of your own would have 
to do if that command was away. 

I suppose the whole force which has gone forward for you 
is with you by this time, and if so, I think it is the precise 
time to strike a blow. By delay the enemy wiU relatively 
gain upon you — that is, he will gain faster, by fortifications 
and reinforcements^ than you can by reinforcements alone. 

And once more let me tell you it is indispensable to you 
that you strike a blow. 7" am powerless to help this. You 
will do me the justice to remember I always insisted that going 
down the bay in search of a field, instead of fighting at or near 



222 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

Manassas, was only shifting, and not surmounting, a difficulty ; 
that we would find the same enemy, and the same or equal 
intrenchments, at either place. The country will not fail to 
note — is now noting — that the present hesitation to move upon 
an intrenched enemy is but the story of Manassas repeated. 

I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken 
to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a 
fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious 
judgment I consistently can. But you must act. 
Yours, very truly, 

A. Lincoln. 

In publishing this extraordinary letter in his report General 
McClellan contents himself with calling attention to the state- 
ments made by General Keyes and General Barnard as to the 
strength of the lines on which he was thus invited to " move" 
by way of avoiding a movement against himself of " senators 
and representatives ;" and he adds, with characteristic calm- 
ness : " I could not forego the conclusions of my most instructed 
judgment for the mere sake of avoiding the personal conse- 
quences intimated in the President's dispatch." 

The unofficial reader, however, may take the liberty of ob- 
serving the curious inconsistency between the " precise reason" 
which the President here gives for " detaining McDowell" and 
the less precise reasons which the President himself and the 
President's friends elsewhere suggest for the same proceeding. 
Nor can the unofficial reader forbear to note that if the Presi- 
dent really supposed the enemy behind Yorktown was destined 
to gain "by reinforcements" during the delay of a siege he 
cannot have had any reasonable fear of the same enemy's mov- 
ing at the same time northward to take advantage of the 
" open line from Richmond via Manassas to Washington ;" 
the railroad bridges on the said " open line" furthermore hav- 
ing been destroyed by the said enemy on his retreat from Ma- 
nassas. 



LIFE OP GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 223 

On reading such a letter indeed one is tempted to turn from 
the story of the Peninsular campaign with a feeling of sickness 
and shame. The spectacle of a great army and its commander 
launched upon a distant and perilous expedition, at the mercy 
of an executive power so incapably or so criminally adminis- 
tered, may be full of instruction for a future age. But those 
who, living in the present, must bear, in one or another way, 
the burdens which such an administration of authority imposes 
upon the people can scarcely contemplate it without a blinding 
and choking sense of indignation. 

Nor will that indignation be diminished by the reflection 
that, since the removal of General McClellan from command, 
the lives and services of a larger number of faithful soldiers of 
the Union than he then commanded before Yorktown, have 
been uselessly sacrificed to the President's dread lest the 
" country should note " a " hesitation to move upon an in- 
trenched enemy." 

Fredericksburg, Chancellorville, Chicamauga, Spottsylvania, 
Cold Harbor, Petersburg, through such dread lessons as 
these names have taught, it has been necessary for the " com- 
mander-in-chief" at Washington to drive heroic armies before 
he could be made to comprehend the prescience and the sound 
judgment which he thus insulted in the trenches of York- 
town. 

Finally, on the 4th of May, 1862, the overwhelming bat- 
teries of the Union army having been completed, and being 
ready to open from all quarters their irresistible fire upon the 
rebel positions. General Johnston commanded the evacuation 
of Yorktown. 

The news of this event was hailed with delight at the North, 
and with indignation by the southern press. The Confederates 
left behind them all their heavy artillery, and a large supply 
of ammunition. This, however, was not the most serious part 
of the loss inflicted npon them by the capture of Yorktown. 
As this capture opened to General McClellan the road by the 



224 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

York river to Richmond, it compelled the Confederates to 
evacuate Norfolk, fi'om which port, after destroying an im- 
mense amount of public stores. General Huger, with 18,000 
men, a part of whom had been engaged in the defence of 
Yorktown, was withdrawn upon Richmond, to strengthen the 
defence of the capital on the Chickahominy : and the evacua- 
tion of Norfolk in its turn made it necessary for them to blow 
up the Merrimac^ and thus to open the lower James to the 
Federal navy. 

Within a month after his arrival on the Peninsula, and in 
spite of the unparalleled folly — to use no harsher word — with 
which the interests of the campaign had been trifled with at 
Washington, General McClellan had thus won advantages 
which ojQfered to himself and to the Government speedy, tri- 
umphant, and decisive results, upon the single condition that 
the force of the nation should be so concentrated as to enable 
him to turn these advantages to account. 

The evacuation of Yorktown was followed immediately by 
an advance of the victorious army as rapid as the horrible 
condition of the roads and the necessity of establishing a new 
base of supplies on the York River would permit. Having the 
advantage of the railway in his rear, and being much too 
strong in point of numbers to be easily pushed, in retreating 
through a friendly country. General Johnston fell back, fight- 
ing. 

General Sumner, in the front of General McClellan's pur- 
suit, came, with a small part of his corps, upon the enemy, 
strongly intrenched, in front of Williamsburgh. Such was the 
state of the roads, " narrow, and full of frightful morasses, 
from which it was difficult to extricate the cannon," says the 
Prince de Joinville, " although the weather had been fine and 
dry for several days, that no such thing as a general action 
was to be thought of in these virgin forests." The Confeder- 
ate intrenchments were gallantly but fruitlessly assailed by 
General Sumner's cavalry, under General Stoneman. The in- 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 225 

fantry of Sumner came up too late in the evening to elFect 
anything, and during the night one of those tropical rains be- 
gan which in the early spring so often convert whole square 
miles of country in Eastern Virginia into one immense lake. 
The next day was fought the battle of Williamsburgh, begun 
practically by accident, w^hile the commander of the army was 
where his duty called him to be, in the rear,* arranging and 
pushing forward the tremendous work of the general advance. 
The Union troops of General Hooker were first engaged, and 
although they behaved, fighting in the close thickets and al- 
most pathless woods of that marshy wilderness, with extraor- 
dinary gallantry, they sufiered terribly, and had began to fall 
back, when the battle was re-established by General Hancock, 
and by General McClellan, who, having been notified of what 
was going on, had made his way through incredible difficul- 
ties, to the front, and appeared in person on the field at the 
decisive moment to secure the victory to the army of the 
Union. The Prince de Joinville thus paints in simple but 
burning words, this critical and glorious scene : 

* It may seem, perhaps, hardly worth while to notice those imputa- 
tions upon the personal courage of General McClellan, which ignorance 
or malignity alone could have founded upon the fact that the commander- 
in-chief of the army in the field was not always in the van of every ac- 
tion fought by his troops. But a passage in which Mr. Kinglake apolo- 
gizes for Lord Raglan's casual exposure of himself at the battle of the 
Alma, so aptly meets these silly charges that it may well be given here : 
" It was not right — nay, if it were not that success brings justification, 
it would have been scarcely pardonable — that a general charged with 
the care of an army, should be under the guidance of feelings akin to 
the impulses of the chase. By the stir and joyous animation of the 
moment. Lord Raglan was led on into a part of the field which he 
would not have sought to reach in cold blood. He would have regarded 
as nothing the mere difference between being struck by shot, in one 
part of the field, and the risk of being struck by shot in another : but 
he knew that, in general, it is from a point more or less in rear of bat- 
talions actually engaged that a chief can exercise the most constant and 
extended control over his army : and an ideal commander would not 
suffer himself to ride to so forward a spot as to run the risk of losing 
the government of his troops for many minutes together in the critical 
period of an ^oXion"— Invasion of the Grimea, Vol. 1, p. 544 Am. Edition. 



226 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

" The Federal General Hancock, seizing the moment, cried 
to his soldiers, as he waved his cap, * Kow, gentlemen, the 
bayonet !' and charged with his brigade. The enemy could 
not withstand the shock, broke and fled, strewing the field 
with his dead. At this very moment General McClellan, who 
had been detained at Yorktown, appeared on the field. It 
was dusk ; the night was coming on ; the rain still falling in 
torrents. On three sides of the plateau, on which the general 
was, the cannon and the musketry were rattling uninterrupt- 
edly. The success of Hancock had been decisive, and the 
reserves, brought up by the General-in-chief, charging upon the 
field, settled the afiair. Then it was that I saw General McClel- 
lan, passing in front of the 6th cavalry, give his hand to Major 
Williams, with a few words on his brilliant charge of the day 
before. The regiment did not hear what he said, but it knew 
what he meant ; and from every heart went up one of those 
masculine, terrible shouts, which are only to be heard on the 
field of battle. Those shouts, taken up along the whole line, 
struck terror to the enemy. We saw them come upon the 
parapets and look out in silence and motionless upon the 
scene. Then the firing died away, and night fell on the com- 
bat, which in America is called * The Battle of Williamsburg!" 

The Battle of Williamsburg was but an episode in the 
march upon Richmond ; and in the circumstances of the case 
could not possibly have been any more than an episode in that 
march. But it threw the electric light of battle over that love 
of the Army of the Potomac for its commander which had 
already developed itself, and which has since inwrought itself 
so deeply into the moral substance of that army, that in spite 
of two years of incessant obloquy, misrepresentation, and 
calumny poured out upon his head, the name of General 
McClellan rings still like a trumpet through its heart. 

" It seems," observes one of the most brilHant historical 
writers, " that although by human contrivance a whole people 
may be shut out from the knowledge of momentous events, in 



LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 227 

which its armies are taking a part, there is yet a subtle essence 
of truth which will permeate into the heart of a nation thus 
kept in ignorance." 

Through all the clouds which partisan passion has raised 
about the name of General McClellan, through all the rolling 
and swelling slanders of a partisan press, and the wordy mists 
of partizan Reports on the Conduct of the War, this truth has 
made its way into the nation's heart, that the real history of 
that arduous march through the swampy forests of the Penin- 
sula, and of that great siege which has made the rude name 
of the insignificant Chickahominy immortal, is written in the 
love which the soldiers of McClellan bear to their commander. 

Criticism may assail this love, malignity may denounce it ; 
but impartial history has only one verdict upon such affec- 
tions. Their root is in reality — reality proved and tested by 
all that is sharpest and sternest in human experience. Their 
meaning is incontrovertible. He who wins such affections is 
worthy to have won them. 

The feeling of the country in regard to the operations before 
Yorktown and the battle of Williamsburg, found expression 
at the time in the following resolutions, which were unani- 
mously adopted by the House of Representatives, on a motion 
made by Mr. Lovejoy of Illinois, a well known and extreme 
leader of the Republican party, though not a member of the 
committee on the conduct of the war : 

" Resolved^ That it is with feelings of profound satisfaction to 
Almighty God, that the House of Representatives from time 
time hear of the triumphs of the Union armies in the great 
struggle for the supremacy of the Constitution and the in- 
tegrity of the Union. 

" JResolved^ That we receive with profound satisfaction in- 
telligence of the recent victories achieved by the Armies of 
the Potomac, associated from their localities with those of the 
Revolution; and that the sincere thanks of the House are 
hereby tendered to Major-General McClellan for the display 



228 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

of those high military quahties which secure important results 
with but Uttle sacrifice of human Hfe." 

Two days after the evacuation of Yorktown, General Frank- 
lin, sent by water to the right bank of the Pamunkey River, 
disembarked his division, and, after repulsing an attack in 
force of the enemy, secured the occupation of West Point, the 
terminus of the York River Railroad. 

Nine days afterwards, the 16th of May, the headquarters 
of the army were established at White House, the head of 
navigation on the Pamunkey ; and here, under the protection 
of the gunboats, a great depot for the army was established. 

Immediately after the battle of WilUamsburg, General Mc- 
Clellan had pressed the government anew for reinforcements, 
which would enable him to make a decisive attack upon Rich- 
mond. A few days later, on the 14th of May, on learning of 
the destruction of the Merrimac, he again addressed a similar 
appeal to the authorities at Washington : 

" Casualties, sickness, garrisons and guards, have much weak- 
ened my force, and will continue to do so. I cannot bring into 
actual battle against the enemy more than eighty thousand 
men at the utmost, and with them I must attack in position, 
probably intrenched, a much larger force — perhaps double my 
numbers. It is possible that Richmond may be abandoned 
without a serious struggle, but the enemy are actually in great 
strength between here and there, and it would be unwise, and 
even insane for me to calculate upon anything but a stubborn 
and desperate resistance. If they should abandon Richmond, 
it may well be that it is done with the purpose of making the 
stand at some place in Virginia south or west of there, and 
we should be in condition to press them without delay. The 
confederate leaders must employ their utmost efforts against 
this army in Virginia, and they will be supported by the whole 
body of their military officers, among whom there may be said 
to be no Union feeling, as there is also very little among the 
higher class of citizens in the seceding States. 



LIFE or GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 229 

"I have found no fighting men in this Peninsula — all are in 
the ranks of the opposing foe. 

" Even if more troops than I now have should prove unne- 
cessary for purposes of military occupation, our greatest dis- 
play of imposing force in the capital of the rebel government 
will have the best moral effect. I most respectfully and ear- 
nestly urge upon your excellency that the opportunity has 
come for striking a fatal blow at the enemies of the Constitu- 
tion, and I beg that you will cause this army to be reinforced 
without delay by all the disposable troops of the government. 
I ask for every man that the government can send me. Any 
commander of the reinforcements, whom your excellency may 
designate, will be acceptable to me, whatever expression I may 
have heretofore addressed to you on that subject. 

" I will fight the enemy, whatever their force may be, and 
whatever force I may have, and I firmly believe that we shall 
beat them, but our triumph should be made decisive and com- 
plete. The soldiers of this army love their government, and 
Will fight well in its support ; you may rely upon them. They 
have confidence in me as their general, and in you as their 
President. Strong reinforcements will at least save the lives 
of many of them. The greater our force the more perfect will 
be our combinations, and the less our loss. 

" For obvious reasons, I beg you to give immediate consid- 
eration to this communication, and to inform me fully at the 
earliest moment of your final determination." 

Geo. B. McClellan, 

Maj.- Ge7i. Comm. 

An immediate response to this appeal, in the form of an 
order sending forward the corps of General McDowell by 
water, would have enabled General McClellan, at once, to 
transfer his base of operations to the James River, by enabling 
him to oblique upon that river, and attack the newly con- 
structed forts at Ward's or Drury's Bluff, to which the guns 



230 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

and the crew of the Merrimac had been transferred, and by 
which the federal gunboats were beaten off on the 15th of 
May. 

No response whatever came until the 18th of May, when 
the secretary of war telegraphed, refusing to send General 
McDowell by water, because it would " uncover the capital 
entirely," and also, because it would " require more time," 
but announcing that, " in order to increase the strength of the 
attack upon Richmond, at the earliest moment General McDow- 
ell had been ordered to march upon that city by the shortest 
route, and keeping himself always in position to save the 
capital from all possible attack, so to operate as to put his left 
wing in communication with the right wing of General Mc- 
Clellan's, who was further "instructed to co-operate by ex- 
tending his right wing to the north of Richmond." 

This order demands our attention. It determined the whole 
course of the siege of Richmond, and to it may be directly 
traced all the misfortunes which attended that siege. 

In the first place, it peremptorily extinguished all hope of 
reaching the James River as a base of operations. 

In the second place, it made it certain that the Confederates, 
seeing so powerful a force as that of General McDowell's ma- 
ncEuvred with an evident eye to the safety of Washington 
rather than to the capture of Richmond, would understand 
that a very slight demonstration towards the former capital 
would secure for them an undisturbed liberty of concentration 
against the unsupported Army of the Potomac. 

In the third place, it compelled General McClellan to expose 
his army to great danger from such a hostile concentration, 
by requiring him to extend his right wing in a very ^Jiazardous 
manner beyond the Chickahominy, thus greatly weakening his 
line, and in the event of any failure on the part of General 
McDowell to join him, positively inviting the blow which, 
upon that failure, was, indeed, eventually struck. 

The instructions issued to General McDowell at the same 



" LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 231 

time with this order to General McClellan, indicate a firm be- 
lief at Washington that the enemy were likely to advance in 
force by Fredericksburg upon Washington, thus uncovering 
their flank to General McClellan. General McClellan, who 
knew his antagonists better, by no means shared this belief, 
but annoyed as he was at the refusal of the government to 
reinforce him properly by water, he determined to hope every- 
thing from the advance of McDowell by land, knowing, as he 
well knew, the capacity of that officer, and his anxiety to play 
a prominent and decisive part in the war. 

He learned nothing positive, however, in regard to the de- 
tails, or the probable time of this advance, on which so much 
depended, until Saturday, the 24th of May, when the President 
telegraphed to him, that although " Banks was yet in some 
peril at Front Royal," (where Jackson was then operating for 
the precise object at which General McClellan had foreseen 
that the enemy would aim,) still " McDowell could, and posi- 
tively would, move on Monday morning to join the Army of 
the Potomac." 

The telegram which brought this good news, bore with it, 
unfortunately, abundant evidences of the President's undimin- 
ished confidence in his own capacity as a commander-in-chief, 
such as certain hints to General McClellan about things which 
he might " do almost as well as not" while building the Chick- 
ahominy bridges. Still in such matters happily " the hearer 
was one and the speaker another," and if McDowell was really 
coming, the President's brilhant military suggestions could do 
no great harm. 

But McDowell was not really coming. Late in the evening 
of the same day. May 24th, came the following telegram in his 
stead : — 

May 34, 1862. 
From Washington, 4 P. M., '62. 
Maj.-Gen. G. B. McClellan : 

In consequence of Gen. Banks' critical position, I have been 



232 LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAi?'. 

compelled to suspend Gen. McDowell's movements to join 
you. The enemy are making a desperate push upon Harper's 
Ferry, and we are trying to throw Gen. Fremont's force and 
part of Gen. McDowell's in their rear. 

A. Lincoln, 

President. 

" Stonewall " Jackson was doing his work effectually. Such 
was the panic spread by his dashing and eccentric demonstra- 
tions, and such the profound obfuscation which he contrived 
to breed in the official mind at Washington, that he actually 
wrung from Mr. Lincoln, on the 25th of May, the following 
telegram : — 

Washington, May 25, 1862, 2 P. M. 
Maj.-Gen. McClellan : 

The enemy is moving north in sufficient force to drive Gen. 
Banks before him ; precisely in what force we cannot tell. He 
is also threatening Leesburg and Geary on the Manassas Gap 
Railroad from both north and south — in precisely what force 
we cannot tell. I think the movement is a general and a con- 
certed one, such as could not be if he was acting upon the 
23U7'2^ose of a very desperate defence of Hichmond. I think 
the tiiJie is near when you must either attack Mich'tnond or 
give up thejoh^ and come hack to the defence of Washington. 
Let me hear from you iiistantly. 

A. Lincoln, President. 

Possessed with an extraordinary infatuation as to the proba- 
bility of the enemy's swooping down upon Washington by 
the Avay of Fredericksburg, the President for some days could 
not be made to comprehend that there was anything important 
in the world to be done excepting to cut the Fredericksburg 
and Richmond Railroad. In vain did General McClellan urge 
some attention to the true principles of the defence of Wash- 
ington as laid down by him before leaving the Potomac. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 233 

The whole alarm of the administration centred upon the city 
of the Rappahannock. 

On the 26th General McDowell advanced beyond the Rap- 
pahannock, and the enemy in that quarter began to fall back 
towards Hanover Court House and Richmond. 

This rebel force, commanded by Generals Anderson and 
Branch, was considerable enough in numbers to threaten the 
right and rear of General McClellan's extended line, and he at 
once ordered General Fitz John Porter, then justly described by 
the New York Times as one of the " noblest, most painstaking 
and trustworthy of our officers," to attack and dislodge it. 

General Porter performed this duty with signal success. 
The battle of Hanover Court House was fought by him on the 
27th of May. The whole division of General Branch, about 
10,000 strong, was utterly routed, and General Anderson, who 
was supporting him at Ashland, hastily retreated upon Rich- 
mond. The fugitives from these points carried the news of 
the disaster into the rebel capital, where it was universally 
supposed that Jackson's diversion had failed of its great object, 
and that the action indicated the junction of the army of Mc- 
Dowell with the army of McClellan. This belief threw the 
city into the greatest alarm and confusion. The road leadings 
to the south were crowded with escaping citizens, household 
goods, official archives, women and children; and had the 
junction of the two Union armies been really now effected, 
and General McClellan been thus enabled to force a decisive^ 
battle for the possession of Richmond, it can scarcely be 
doubted that the place must have fallen into his hands. So 
well aware of this was General McClellan, that immediately 
after the victory he telegraphs to the government : — 

" There is no doubt that the enemy are concentrating every- 
thing on Richmond. I will do my best to cut off Jackson, but 
am doubtful whether I can. 

" It is the policy and duty of the government to send me 
by water all the well drilled troops available. I am confident 



234 LITE OF GEN. GEORGE B. MoCLELLAN. 

that Washington is in no danger. Engines and cars in large 
numbers have been sent up to bring down Jackson's command. 

" I may not be able to cut them off, but will try ; we have 
cut all but the F. and R. R. R. The real issue is in the battle 
about to be fought in front of Richmond. All our available 
troops should be collected here, not raw regiments, but the 
well drilled troops. It cannot be ignored that a desperate bat- 
tle is before us ; if any regiment of good troops remain unem- 
ployed it will be an irreparable fault committed." 

On the next day, the 29th, having gained information that 
there was positively no rebel force between Hanover Junction 
and Fredericksburg, he telegraphed this also to Washington. 
The President and secretary of war, however, on the authority 
of " certain contrabands," preferred to believe that the rebels 
were not concentrating on Richmond, but on the contrary re- 
enforcing the terrible Stonewall Jackson, who might at any 
moment destroy Gen. Banks, devour Gen. Fremont, and anni- 
hilate Washington. 

They accordingly threw away all the results of the battle of 
Hanover Court House by not only refusing to permit McDow- 
ell to join the Army of the Potomac, but by absolutely order- 
ing him to " burn the bridges" by which that junction should 
have been effected. 

Two years of wasting and fruitless efforts have since atoned 
for the colossal blunder then committed. 

The golden opportunity offered to the country at the end of 
May, 1862, by Porter and McClellan, has never since returned. 

The Confederates were not slow to avail themselves of the 
advantages held out to them by the bewilderment and vacilla- 
tion of the Washington government. Gen. McClellan, as we 
have already seen, had been obliged to extend his line dan- 
gerously in order to meet the overland advance of McDowell, 
and to attempt to hold both banks of the Chickahominy, in 
order to secure his own communications. 

As soon as it was ascertained that Stonewall Jackson had 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 235 

arfested the advance of General McDowell, General Johnston, 
at Richmond, at once determined to throw himself upon the 
weakest point of General McClellan's position. 

A rain-storm of unparalleled violence, on the night of May 
30th, favored his designs. In a few hours the Chickahominy 
became a roaring torrent. All the bridges of the Army of 
the Potomac,* with a single exception, were rendered im- 
practicable ; the roads were destroyed. On the morning of 
the 31st of May the Confederates furiously assailed the left 
wing of General McClellan's army. At Fair Oaks, General 
Casey's redoubts, in the advance of the wing, were stormed 
and carried, and after a desperate battle, in which the advan- 
tage rested with the Confederates, their victorious progress 
threatening the absolute destruction of the whole left wing, 
was arrested with difficulty just at nightfall, by the artiUery of 
General Sumner. 

Night put an end to the conflict. During the night an at- 
tempt was made, under the instructions of General McClellan, 
— who, rising from a sick bed, passed nearly the whole night 
on horseback — to throw new bridges across the stream, and 
pass over the whole right wing of the Army of the Potomac. 
It was too late, the floods increasing prevented the execution 
of the work, f 

* Testimony of General Barnard. Report on the Conduct of the War. 
Vol. i., p. 401. 

f The Confederates miscalculated the moment when these floods would 
be at their highest. They began to rise most furiously about twenty- 
four hours after the commencement of the storm, and rose with great 
force during the night of the 31st of May and first of June. " About 
eleven o'clock P. M. on the 31st of May," says an engineer oflBlcer, " I re- 
ceived orders to construct a bridge, and proceeding to the spot found 
the stream somewhat swollen, and rising rapidly, * * * I commenced 
laying the bridge three feet above the level of the water. The water 
continued rising very fast, and the current became so swift as to render 
the work extremely difficult. At about four o'clock I had succeeded in 
placing three lengths of trestles, when I was relieved by Captain 
Ketchimi. At that time the water had risen so as nearly to submerge 
the bridge." — Report of Captain Brainerd in Barnard's Report, ut, sup. 



236 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

The battle began again in the morning on the side of the 
Federal troops, with all the valor of desperation ; on the side 
of the Confederates in a fierce, confused, disorderly fashion 
attributable to the fact, not then generally known to either 
army, that General Johnston, exposing himself with his usual 
gallantry, had fallen dangerously wounded. This circumstance 
left the rebel army for a time without a recognized leader. 

Failing to overcome the determined resistance of the Fede- 
ral troops, the Confederates, about noon on the 1st of June, 
fell back in extreme confusion on Richmond. 

Thus ended the battle of Fair Oaks. Had it been possible 
for General McClellan at this time to throw his right wing, 
with his artillery, across the Chickahominy, and to advance upon 
Richmond during the two or three days of confusion, which 
followed the failure of the Confederate attack, and the fall of 
General Johnston, Richmond might have doubtless been seized 
and occupied. 

Thanks to the confused and contradictory orders from 
Washington, by which his army had been forced to assume 
the position which it held before the battle, and to the tre- 
mendous rains of the 30th of May, this was, however, impos- 
sible. 

General Lee succeeded immediately to the command vaca- 
ted by the fall of General Johnston ; the Army of the Poto- 
mac strengthened itself in its positions, and on the 3d of June 
we find Mr. Lincoln considerately telegraphing to General Mc- 
Clellan to keep a close eye on the Chickahominy River ! 

The first days of June passed on, continual rains surrounded 
the operations of the army with difficulties which, as Mr. 
Stanton, on the 11th, telegraphed to General McClellan, "no 
art or skill could possibly avoid but only endure." The rein- 

p. 96. " Changed direction of bridge. Everything went on smoothly 
until I reached the sixtli trestle, when, in endeavoring to raise the abut- 
ment, owing to rapid rise of the water, the whole structure surged in 
shore, and fell with a crash." — Report of Captain Ketchum. Ibid., p. 98. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE E. McCLELLAN. £37 

forcements so urgently needed still failed to arrive, although 
the battle of Fair Oaks had plainly revealed the determined 
concentration of the enemy on Richmond. 

So weak had now become the extended lines that on the 
13th of June the rebel General Stuart, with fifteen hundred 
cavalry and four guns, was able to make a clever circuit of the 
whole army. 

Mortifying as this occurrence was to the army, and credita- 
ble as it was to the hostile cavalry, it was naturally invited by 
the great extension of the lines, and was after all a much less 
daring feat than the dash of the Confederate General Hamp- 
ton in September, 1864, through the powerful front of Lieu- 
tenant-General Grant's position on the James River, with its 
resultant capture of the whole supply herd of the Federal 
army. 

On the 10th of June, having been notified by the secretary 
of war that General McCall's division was on its way to join 
him, General McClellan sent the following dispatch to Wash- 
ington, in which it will be seen that he recommends, as a means 
of counteracting the enemy's concentration on Richmond, pre- 
cisely that movement on Atlanta, which has since, under the 
orders of General Grant, been adopted : 

June 10,1862—3:30 p.m. 

I have again information that Beauregard has arrived, and 
that some of his troops are to follow him. No great rehance, 
perhaps none whatever, can be attached to this ; but it is pos- 
sible, and ought to be their policy. 

I am completely checked by the weather. The roads and 
fields are literally impassable for artillery, almost so for infan- 
try. The Chickahominy is in a dreadful state ; we have 
another rain storm on our hands. 

I shall attack as soon as the weather and ground will per- 
mit ; but there will be a delay, the extent of which no one can 
foresee, for the season is altogether abnormal. 



238. LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

In view of these circumstances, I present for your consider- 
ation the propriety of detaching largely from Halleck's army 
to strengthen this ; for it would seem that Halleck has now 
no large organized force in front of him, while we have. 

If this cannot be done, or even in connection with it, allow 
me to suggest the movement of a heavy column from Dalton 
upon Atlanta. If but the one can be done, it would better 
conform to military principles to strengthen this army ; and 
even although the reinforcements might not arrive in season to 
take part in the attack upon Richmond, the moral effect would 
be great, and they would furnish valuable assistance in ulterior 
movements. 

I wish to be distinctly understood that whenever the 
weather permits, I will attack with whatever force I may 
have, although a larger force would enable me to gain much 
more decisive results. 

I would be glad to have McCall's infantry sent forward by 
water at once, without waiting for his artillery and cavalry. 

If General Prim returns via Washington, please converse 
with him as to the condition of affairs here. 

In his response to this dispatch, the secretary at war seems to 
have been visited by a momentary gleam of practical wisdom 
as to the situation. He promises to communicate General 
McClellan's suggestions at once to General Halleck, with " a 
request that he shall conform to them ;" promises to send for- 
ward McDowell's force speedily ; and adds, " it is clear that a 
strong force is operating with Jackson, for the purpose of de- 
taining the forces here from you." 

On the 20th, in reply to General McClellan's request to be 
informed of the " numbers and positions of the troops not 
under his command in Virginia and elsewhere," information 
of direct practical importance as aiding him to estimate the 
probable force of the enemy in his front, the President replied 
that he could not give the information accurately, and if he 



LIFE OF GEN, GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 239 

could, would rather not transmit it, for fear of its " reaching 
the enemy." 

Thus left in the dark again ; McDowell not coming forward 
as promised by Mr. Stanton ; his army thinned by disease and 
by duty. General McClellan had to contemplate the impending 
certainty of a collision with the whole force of the enemy. 
On the 24th of June a deserter brought the news that Jack- 
son, having thrown the Departments of the Mountain and the 
Rappahannock into a hopeless state of confusion, had been re- 
inforced from Richmond, had retraced his steps, and was rap- 
idly moving upon the weakest point of the Army of the Po- 
tomac. 

Telegraphing to Washington on this subject. General Mc- 
Clellan was answered that " neither McDowell nor Banks nor 
Fremont appeared to have any accurate knowledge" as to 
where Jackson was or what he was doing. 

On the next day, June 25th, General McClellan, his bridges 
and intrenchments being at last completed, took the initiative, 
with the determination of bringing on a general action, in 
which he would now be able to command the services of his 
whole army. He ordered a general advance of his pickets, 
which brought on a stubbornly contested, engagement between 
the enemy and General Heintzelman's forces. The advantage 
rested with the Federal troops, and at night the general tele- 
graphed to Washington " all goes well." 

During that night, however, information came in confirming 
the story of the return of Jackson, thirty thousand strong, 
upon the right and rear of the army. The next morning, the 
right was attacked in force. 

The problem now presented to General McClellan impera- 
tively demanded an immediate solution. That the enemy was 
superior in numbers to himself was proved by his offering bat- 
tle on both sides of the Chickahominy at once. Should the 
Army of the Potomac concentrate to meet this offer on the 
left bank, thus abandoning the attack on Richmond, and risk- 



240 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

ing in case of defeat a retreat on Yorktown; or should it con- 
centrate on the right bank, abandon its depots, its communi- 
cations with the York River, and undertake to swing itself 
boldly around to the James, where with the gunboats at its 
back, it might resume the offensive more rapidly than in the 
other event, and more formidably indeed than ever ? 

General McClellan promptly decided to adopt the latter al- 
ternative. In view of his long-cherished desire to mal^e the 
James his true base, he had more than a week before ordered 
supplies to be sent to City Point ; and he now at once set 
about the task of blinding the enemy as to his intentions. 

How successfully this was done cannot be more clearly or 
impressively told than it has been told by the Prince de Join- 
ville, an eye-witness of all the trying and terrible scenes 
throi;gh which for seven days and nights the army marched 
and fought its way from peril to safety : 

" The distance from Fair Oaks to the James River was not 
great; it was but seventeen miles. But the stores and bag- 
gage had to be moved upon a single road, exposed in front to 
the enemy, who by several different roads radiating from Rich- 
mond could throw a considerable force upon several different 
points at once. The speed with which the operation was con- 
ducted upset his calculations : he probably supposed* that we 
should feel the ground before we acted, and perhaps he 
thought that McClellan would find it hard to make up his 
mind to abandon his lines at White House. He acted at least 
as if this were his view. The troops of General Hill, men- 
tioned above, having crossed the Chickahominy at Meadow 
Bridge on the 26th, the day after the affair with Hooker, in 
the afternoon attacked the troops of McCall, the advance of 
Porter, on the left bank. The first conflict was very severe; 
but McCall occupied a strong position at Beaver Dam, a sort 
of ravine bordered with beautiful catalpa trees, then in flower. 
There he had made abattis and thrown up some earth so that 
he could not be overcome, notwithstanding the length of the 



LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 241 

fight, which lasted until nightfall. This vigorous resistance 
compelled the enemy to throw numerous reinforcements across 
the river. This was exactly what General McClellan desired. 
His intention was to fix the attention of the enemy here while 
on the right bank he prepared his movement to the J^mes 
River. 

" The night was spent in passing over to this bank the whole 
of Porter's baggage and uniting it with " the long train which 
was to set out in the evening of the 27th. The orders were 
given to re-embark or destroy all the stores and magazines 
along the railway to White House, and to evacuate that depot. 
General Stoneman with a flying column was charged with the 
execution of this order. He was to delay the advance of the 
enemy, and fall back, when he had done his duty, upon York- 
town. All this was carried out exactly. At daybreak on the 
27th, McCall was ordered to fall back on the bridges thrown 
across the Chickahominy at Gaines's Mill. Followed up rap- 
idly, as he had exj/ected to be, he joined the other troops of 
Porter's corps, the division of Morell and the regulars com- 
manded by General Sykes. Porter's duty, demanding as 
much self-possession as vigor, was to make a stand in front of 
the bridges, in order to give the army time to accomplish its 
general movement. He was not to cross the bridges till the 
evening of the 27th, and was then to destroy them. His three 
divisions were attacked early in the day. The corps of Jack- 
son coming in from Hanover Court House, took part in the 
action. The battle was fought in a rolling country, extensively 
wooded, but upon certain points open and cleared. The strug- 
gle was arduous ; the Federals resisted with success ; there 
was even one moment at which Porter might have thought 
himself victorious. 

" This would have been a great advantage, and m^ght have 
profoundly modified the position. Accordingly, during this 
moment of hope, McClellan hastened to throw upon the left 
bank all the troops not absolutely necessary to guard the lines 



242 LIFE OP GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 

in front of Richmond. One division, that of Slocnm, crossed 
the bridges before four o'clock and joined in the action. An- 
other, Richardson's, reached the scene only at nightfall. At 
the moment when these reinforcements began to take part in 
the fight, the scene had an imposing character of grandeur. 
"We had thirty-five thousand men engaged, a part in the woods, 
a part in the plain, forming a line a mile and a half long. A 
numerous artillery thundered upon every side. In the valley 
of the Chickahominy the lancers, with floating pennons, were 
stationed as a reserve ; and this whole animated picture of the 
battle was set in a picturesque landscape illuminated by the 
last rays of the sun going down below a horizon as crimson as 
blood. Suddenly the volleys became extraordinarily intense. 
The reserves, which had till now been lying in the hollows, 
were called up, excited by shouts, and sent into the woods. 
The musketry becomes more and more violent, and rolls away 
towards the left. There can no longer be any doubt that the 
enemy is making a final effort on that side. The reserves are 
all engaged, there is not a disposable man left. It is six 
o'clock, the daylight is fast disappearing ; if the Federal army 
can hold out an hour longer the battle is won, for at every 
other point the enemy has been repulsed, and Jackson, Hill, 
Lee, and Longstreet will have urged up their troops in vain. 
For lack of infantry. Porter has put three batteries en potence 
on his extreme left to support the troops who are there sus- 
taining an unequal fight ; but these troops have been in action 
since early morning, they are worn out, and have fired almost 
their last cartridge. ISTow in their turn come up the Confed- 
erate reserves ; they deploy regularly into line against the Fed- 
eral left, which gives way breaks, and disbands. The disorder 
grows from point to point till it reaches the centre of the Fed- 
eral lines. There is no panic ; the men do not fly in the wild 
excitement of fear ; but deaf to every appeal, they march off 
deliberately, their muskets at the shoulder, like people who 
have had enough of it, and do not believe success possible. In 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 243 

vain do the generals, the officers of the staff, among them the 
Count of Paris and the Duke of Chartres, ride sword in hand 
into the mxeUe to stop their disorderly movement ; the battle 
of Gaines' Mill is lost. There is nothing left but to prevent a 
rout. The enemy, indeed, was advancing on the plain still in 
the same order, his infantry deployed by regiments en echelon^ 
and every minute he was closing in upon the confused masses 
of the Federals. Such is the fury of the cannonade and the 
musketry fire that the cloud of dust struck up from the ground 
floats steadily over the battle. Then came the order for the 
cavalry to charge. I happened at this moment to be near its 
position. I saw the troopers draw their swords with the sud- 
den and electrical impulse of determination and devotion. As 
they got into motion I asked a young officer the name of his 
regiment. 'The Fifth cavalry,' he replied, brandishing his 
sabre with a soldier's pride in his regiment. Unfortunate 
young man ! I saw the same regiment next day. From the 
charge of that evening but two officers had returned. He was 
not one of them. 

" The charge failed against the dense battalions of the ene- 
my, and the broken regiments galloping through the ai-tillery 
and the flying infantry in the clouds of dust only increased the 
general disorder. The artillery horses were killed, and I saw, 
with painful emotion, the men working with the courage of 
desperation at guns which could no longer be removed. They 
dropped one after another. Two alone were left at last, and 
they continued to load and fire almost at point-blank range 
upon the enemy. Then the deepening twilight hid the scene 
All these guns were lost. 

" General Butterfield had made in vain the most superhuman 
efforts to save them. On foot, his horse having been shot, 
struck in the hat by the fragment of a shell, and his sabre hit 
by a ball, surrounded by his aids-de-camp, of whom several 
fell at his side, he had tried to rally the infantry around a flag 
planted in the ground. He succeeded, but only for a few mo- 



244: LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAK. 

ments ; the precipitate rush of the retreat carried everything 
away. Happily night came on, and after losing a mile of 
ground, the army reached the fresh brigades of Meagher and 
French, which were formed in good order. These brigades 
sent up a vigorous hurrah, and a few guns put anew in battery 
opened their fire upon the enemy, who paused at last, checked 
by this final and determined resistance. 

"As the last guns of this action were firing, we heard a 
lively rattle of musketry from the direction of Fair Oaks, on 
the other side of the river. It came from the Confederates, 
who were attacking the Federal works ; but the attack, which 
was probably only a demonstration, was vigorously repelled. 

" The day had been severe. In the main battle, that of 
Gaines' Mill, thirty-five thousand Federals had failed to defeat 
sixty thousand Confederates, but they had held them in check. 
More could not have been expected. 

" During the night the Federals repassed the bridges of the 
Chickahominy in perfect order, destroying them after they had 
passed. They left behind them the field of battle, ^covered 
with the dead (for in this fierce conflict the losses on both sides 
had been considerable) a great number of wounded, too much 
hurt to be moved, a dozen guns, and a few prisoners, among 
whom was General Reynolds. The corps of Keyes, which 
was in the advance, fell back towards the James River, and 
took possession of the passage of a large morass. White Oak 
Swamp, which is traversed by the road the army was to take 
as well as by the principal lines of communication T^hich could 
be used by the enemy to harass us. 

" The 28th and 29th of June were passed in sending forward 
the train of five thousand wagons, the siege train, a herd of 
twenty-five hundred oxen, and other impedhneiita. The 
reader may judge what a piece of work this was, when he 
reflects that it was all to be done upon a single narrow road. 
The first day we were undisturbed ; the enemy was exhausted 
by the previous day's battle ; he seemed, moreover astonished 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 245 

and disconcerted, and did not yet fully understand the object 
of the Federal army. The whole of this army was united on 
the right bank of the Chickahominy, whilst the bulk of the 
Confederate forces was upon the left bank, and the bridges 
were down. To recross the river they would be forced either 
to build new bridges or to fall back some distance to the Me- 
chanicsville bridge ; either of which operations involved time. 
Now, time was everything, and the retreating army put it to 
good use. It was not until the 29th that the Southern col- 
umns came in sight of the Federal rear-guard, A battle at 
once began, at Savage's Station, but the enemy were vigor- 
ously received, and after repulsing them the Federals waited 
till nightfall before recommencing their march. The last duty 
done by the telegraph the day before was to inform us that 
the Confederates were at White House. This post they had 
found abandoned. The morning of the 29th had been spent 
by us in destroying all that could not be carried away from 
the camps. A complete railway train, locomotive, tender, and 
cars, which had been left on the rails was sent headlong over 
the broken bridge into the river. Nothing was left for the 
foe but three siege guns, which could not be moved, and which 
we neglected to bury.* These were the only siege guns he 
captured, although the story has been everywhere repeated 
that he took the whole Federal siege train with the exception 
of these three pieces. The whole of that train reached the 
James River in safety. Our great misfortune was, that we 
were -obliged to abandon so many of our wounded, not only 
at Gaines' Mill and at Savage's Station, but along the whole 
line of retreat. This misfortune was inevitable. It was only 
by ceaseless fighting that we could protect our retreat, and 
the transportation of so many wounded men would have re- 
quired conveniences which we did not possess. 

* The Prince is here in error. The army, by the official statement 
of General Barry, lost but one siege gun, the carriage of which broke 
down so that it could not be moved. 



246 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

" General McClellan, during the 29th, and the morning of 
the 30th, remained near White Oak Swamp, urging on the 
passage of his enormous train. The heat was overwhelming. 
His aides-de-camp, continually galloping from the rear guard 
to the advance, were utterly exhausted. So long as this huge 
train divided the different parts of the army we were in great 
danger. But nothing disturbed the serene self-possession of 
the General-in-chief. On the 29th he had stopped, I remem- 
ber, to rest in the verandah of a house by the wayside, when 
the mistress of the establishment came to complain to him that 
the soldiers were eating her cherries. The general rose with 
a smile, went himself and put a stop to the pillage. But he 
could not prevent the shells, next day, from setting fire to the 
house of his pretty hostess. 

" At daybreak ourthe 30th McClellan had the satisfaction of 
seeing all his troops and all his trains in safety beyond White 
Oak Swamp, which was to oppose a new barrier to the pur- 
suit of the enemy. By the evening of the next day, Generals 
Keyes and Porter were in communication with the gunboats 
on the James. The trains had moved upon roads pointed out 
by the negro guides. The heads of the columns had met 
nothing but small detachments of cavalry, which they had 
easily dispersed. The hardest part of the work was done, but 
it was to be supposed that the enemy would renew his attempt 
to disturb the retreat. So the general took his measures in 
time. He left Sumner and Franklin to act as the rear guard, 
and hold the passage of White Oak Swamp ; and put Heint- 
zelman with the divisions of Hooker, Kearney, Sedgwick, and 
McCall, across the point of intersection of the roads leading 
from Richmond. They protected the trains and reached the 
James River at the exact moment when the transports with 
provision and ammunition, and the hospital ships, which, with 
wise foresight. General McClellan had ordered up ten days 
before, arrived from Fortress Monroe. 

" Meanwhile, as had been expected, Franklin and Sumner 



LIFE OP GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 247 

were sharply attacked in White Oak Swamp, to which point 
the Confederate generals had brought a large force of artillery. 
They fell back step by step. Later in the day Heintzelman 
also was attacked at the Cross-roads. Here the battle raged 
with varying fortune, in the woods. The divisions of McCall 
suffered severely, and its commander was made prisoner ; but 
Hooker and Kearney, coming to his help, repulsed the assail- 
ants with great loss. They did not, however, succeed in res- 
cuing the general, who was sent into Richmond to join 
Reynolds. 

" Finally, a third attack upon the corps of Fitz-John Porter 
failed utterly under the combined fire of the field artillery, and 
the gunboats. Porter occupied a superb position at a place 
called Turkey Bend, by some persons, and Malvern Hill by 
others. This position was a lofty open plateau, sloping grad- 
ually down to the roads by which the enemy must debouch. 
The left rested upon the river, where lay the Galena, the 
Monitor, and the flotilla of gunboats. The Federal army then 
had noticing to fear from this side, and had consequently only 
one flank to protect, which was easily done with abattis and 
field works. On the evening of the 30th, all the divisions of 
the army were united in this strong position, and here the 
whole train, including the siege guns, was sheltered. The 
army was in communication with its transports and supplies. 
The grand and daring movement by which it had escaped a 
serious danger, and changed an untenable base of operations 
for one more safe and sure, had been accomplished ; but after 
so prolonged an effort the troops were worn out ; for five days 
they had been incessantly marching and fighting. The heat 
had added to their excessive fatigue ; many men had been 
sun-struck ; others quitted the ranks and fell into the lament- 
able procession of sick and wounded, which followed the army 
as well as it could, and as fast as it could. Doubtless, during 
this difficult retreat, there had been moments of confusion and 
disorder, but of what army in like circumstances would not 



248 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

this have been true ? This one fact remained unassailable : 
that^ attached in the midst of a difficult and hostile country 
by twice its oionforce^ the Army of the Potomac had succeeded 
in gaining a position in which it was out of danger^ and 
from which^ had it been properly reinforced^ had the concerir 
tration of the enemy"* s forces been met by a liTce conceiitration, 
it might have rapidly resumed the offensive. 

" As we have said, each of its necessarily scattered sections 
had for five days been called upon to resist the most furious 
assaults, and had done so with vigor. N'ow that it was as- 
sembled as a whole upon Malvern Hill, the Confederate army, 
also reunited, might possibly make a last effort against it. So 
in the night of the 30th of June and 1st of July, McClellan 
prepared himself for this eventuality. He put his whole artil- 
lery, at least three hundred guns, into battery along the 
heights, arranging them in such wise that their fire should not 
interfere with the defence by the infantry of the sort of glacis 
up which the enemy would be obliged to advance to the at- 
tack. The artillery fire was to- be reinforced by the 100- 
pounders of the gunboats, which were ordered to flank tho 
position. It was mere madness to rush upon such obstacles ; 
but the Confederates attempted it. Again and again, during 
the day of the 1st of July, they undertook to carry Malvern 
Hill, but without the slightest chance of success. The whole 
day for them was an idle butchery. Their loss was very heavy; 
that of the Federals insignificant. This success was due to 
two causes : First, to the fortunate foresight of the general, 
who, in spite of numerous natural obstacles to the passage of 
artillery, had spared nothing to bring his on, and next to the 
firmness of his troops. Men do not make such a campaign, 
and go through such experience as they had endured, without 
coming out more or less formed to war. If their primitive 
organization had been better, the survivors of this rude cam- 
paign, I do not fear to assert, might be regarded as the equals 
of the best soldiers in the world. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 249 

" On the evening after this battle, the exhausted enemy re- 
tired to appear no more, and the Aimy of the Potomac took 
up a position and sought rest at Harrison's Bar, a spot chosen 
by the engineers and the navy as the most favorable for de- 
fence and for receiving supplies. The campaign against Rich- 
mond had ended without success, but not without honor. The 
honor of the army was safe ; but those who had looked to 
success for the early restoration of the Union under an impulse 
of generous and patriotic conciliation, saw their hopes un- 
happily fade away." 



CHAPTER X. 

CLOSE OF THE PENINSULA CAMPAIGN. THE AEMT ORDEEED TO 
ACQIJIA CHEEK. 

Of the military qualities revealed by General McClellan in 
the coiiception and the execution of the brilliant and daring 
movement by which the Army of the Potomac was swung 
away from the overwhelming attack of the confederates on the 
line of the Chickahominy, and re-estabhshed upon the new 
base of the James River, but one opinion has ever been ex- 
pressed by competent critics. Dazzled by the vastness of the 
area over which the present war is fighting out, by the num- 
bers of men arrayed in it " for mutual slaughter," and by the 
transcendent importance to ourselves, at least, of the issues in- 
volved, we are apt to forget what is nevertheless the fact, that 
the bloody record of the past few years in America is, for the 
most part, a record rather of desperate and indomitable fight- 
ing than of striking strategic skill. It has been marked by 
many fierce encounters of hostile armies, but by few great 
battles. It is not necessary here to enter into an elaborate 
analysis of the causes of this fact, causes which are to be 
looked for as well in the topographical conditions of the war 
as in the constitution of the armies engaged. 

The fact itself is unquestionable, and if, rejecting that 
sound Roman maxim that victories won in civil strife should 
be looked back upon with a solemn sadness rather than with 
the glow of pride naturally kindled by the recollection of 
triumphs snatched from a foreign foe, the Americans of the 
next generation shall seek to measure the skill in arms and the 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 251 

military virtue of their fathers by the highest standards of 
civiHzed war, there will be found few passages of the great 
conflict for the Union on which such stress may be safely laid 
as can be borne by the story of the retreat to the James. 

To the general who led that great retreat, his brave army, 
at least, anticipating history, has already done such justice as 
only an army can do to its general. 

On the 28th of June, being then at Savage's Station, sur- 
rounded by the columns of his heroic army, shattered by the 
terrible battle of Gaines' Mill, but undaunted and firmly front- 
ing still the foe; and shocked into a rare outburst of profound 
and passionate indignation by the fatal confirmation of all that 
he had feared and vainly fought against, as the almost inevita- 
ble consequence of the conduct of the administration, General 
McClellan had telegraphed to the secretary of war at Wash- 
ington. 

" If we have lost the day we have yet preserved our honor, 
and no one need blush for the Army of the Potomac. I have 
lost this battle because my force was too small. I again re- 
peat that I am not responsible for this, and I say it with the 
earnestness of a general who feels in his heart the loss of every 
brave man who has been needlessly sacrificed to-day. I still 
hope to retrieve our fortunes, but to do this the government 
nmst view the matter in the same earnest light that I do. 
You must send me very large reinforcements, and send them 
at once. ****** I feel too earnestly to-night. I 
have seen too many dead and wounded comrades to feel other- 
wise than that the government has not sustained this army. 
If you do not do so the game is lost. If I save this army 
now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any 
other person in Washington. You have done your best to 
sacrifice this army." 

Stern and terrible words ! such words as no man speaks or 
can speak save under the strain of a reality as stern and terri 



252 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. MoCLELLAN. 

ble, words in which the heart of the whole army throbbed 
within the heart of their general, and made him " strong in 
speaking truth." 

Upon these words, which, condensed into a single fierce, 
emphatic charge the accumulated evidences of folly, reckless- 
ness, jealousy and incapacity which have steadily gathered in 
upon the course of this story, the biographer of Mr. Lincoln 
remarks that he does not believe " any subordinate was ever 
before permitted to' say such a thing to his superior officer 
without instant dismissal." 

A more complete admission than this, of the irresistible jus- 
tice of the charge, it would not be easy to imagine. Mr. Lin- 
coln's biographer is in the right ; no subordinate probably was 
ever before known, in the history of the world, to make such 
a charge as this against his superior without instant dismissal, 
and had the charge been anything else than the thing it was, 
the downright uncontrollable assertion, namely, of an absolute 
fact, felt to be a fact in the just and indignant heart of him 
who asserted it, and felt to be a fact in the conscience-stricken 
and paralyzed spirit of those of whom it was asserted, the 
failure of the secretary of war and of the President to dismiss 
General McClellan from the service of the United States im- 
mediately upon the receipt of this telegram, would brand these 
officials as ineffaceably with the stamp of utter unfitness to 
administer a great war, as their trembhng acquiescence in the 
charge now does. For so far were they from dismissing the 
general who thus brought home to them, as by a flash of elec- 
tric passion from the lurid bosom of that thunder-cloud of bat- 
tle then rolled and heaped around him, the anticipative judg- 
ment of a nation upon their guilty trifling with a people's honor 
and J, people's life, that the secretary was stricken into silence, 
and the President replied with this lamentable plea in mitiga- 
tion of the charge : — 

Washington, June 28, 1862. 

Save your army at all events. Will send reinforcements as 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 263 

fast as we can. Of course they cannot reach you to-day, to- 
morrow, or next day. I have not said that you were ungene- 
rous for saying you needed reinforcements. I thought you 
were ungenerous in assuming that I did not send them as fast 
as I could. I feel any misfortune to you and your army as 
keenly as you feel it yourself. If you have had a drawn battle 
or a repulse, it is the price we pay for the enemy not being in 
Washington. We i^rotected Washington, and the enemy con- 
centrated on you. Had we stripped Washington, he would 
have been upon us before the troops sent could have got to 
you. Less than a week ago you notified us that reinforcements 
were leaving Richmond to come in front of us. It is the na- 
ture of the case, and neither you nor the Government is to 
blame. 

A. Lincoln. 

Never, it may be safely said, were the relative positions of a 
superior officer and of a subordinate so completely reversed as 
in this presidential response to General McCIellan's indictment 
of the administration ; and never, it must be said, has a less 
successful attempt been made to evade an indictment so over- 
whelming. 

More than a fortnight before this telegram was sent, the 
secretary of war, as we have seen, had been visited with a 
brief interval of military common sense. On the 10th of June 
he had telegraphed to General McClellan, " It is clear that a 
strong force is operating with Jackson, for the purpose of de- 
taining the forces here from you^ 

Yet this purpose of Jackson, thus recognized by the secre- 
tary of war, the secretary of war had permitted Jackson fully 
to accomplish. Again, on the 25th of June, the secretary of 
war had admitted to General McClellan his " suspicion " that 
" Jackson's real movement " was directed against Richmond. 
The notice which the President asserts that General McClellan 
had given the Government — of troops leaving Richmond, to 



254 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

" come in front " of Washington, was a notice of no such 
thing ; it was a notice given, as the President and the secreta- 
ry of war well knew, to reinforce the evidence abeady become 
morally irresistible when it was given, of the reinforcement of 
Jackson from Richmond, in order to enable him to strike, with 
more tremendous effect, that blow upon the weakened and ex- 
tended right wing of the Army of the Potomac, that right wing 
weakened and extended by their fault, and theirs alone, under 
the force of which the Army of the Potomac had finally been 
driven from its positions on the Chickahominy. 

The " misfortune " which had happened to the Army of the 
Potomac, was not the " price paid " by the President and the 
secretary of war for " being in Washington." 

It was the " price paid " by the country, indeed, for the 
presence of those ofiicials in Washington. To those officials 
it was the " price paid " by them for their own license to laugh 
to scorn, and trample upon, the first principles of the art of 
war. To the " progressive Kepublicans " it was the " price 
paid " by them for their success in *' pressing " the President 
to create worse than superfluous " departments " of command 
for one and another officer in whom they delighted. To the 
"joint committee on the conduct of the war," it was the " price 
paid " by them for their elevation to the dignity of Aulic Coun- 
cillors, dispensing wisdom from books of mihtary science, and 
" organizing victory " by the light of political inspiration. 

But so dear and precious to these many purchasers of the 
pomps and vanities of power were these objects, bought with 
so much blood of brave men, spilled in vain, that, as we shall 
see, they esteemed the price thus paid not yet sufficiently 
ample. 

The magnificent victory of Malvern Hill enabled the army 
of the Potomac to fall back safely upon the new base which 
had been selected for it on the James River, at Harrison's Bar, 
by General McClellan, and Captain Rodgers, the commander 
of the naval force, on the co-operation of which it was now 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. MoCLELLAIf. 255 

able to rely. This movement was committed to, and success- 
fully carried out, under the direct supervision of General 
Keyes ; and on the Fourth of July, 1862, the following address 
was issued by General McClellan to his troops from his head- 
quarters on the James : 

Soldiers of the Army op the Potomac ! 

Your achievements of the last ten days have illustrated the 
valor and endurance of the American soldier. Attacked by 
superior forces, and without the hope of reinforcements, you 
have succeeded in changing your base of operations by a flank 
movement, always regarded as the paost hazardous of military 
expedients. You have saved all your material, all your trains, 
and all your guns, except a few lost in battle, taking in return 
guns and colors from the enemy. Upon your march you have 
been assailed day after day, with desperate fury, by men of the 
same race and nation, skillfully massed and led. Under every 
disadvantage of number, and necessarily of position also, you 
have in every conflict beaten back your foes with enormous 
slaughter. 

Your conduct ranks you among the celebrated armies of 
history. No one will now question that each of you may 
always say, with pride : " I belong to the Army of the Poto- 
mac." 

You liave reached the new base, complete in organization 
and unimpaired in spirit. The enemy may at any moment at- 
tack you. We are prepared to meet them. I have personally 
established your lines. Let them come, and we will convert 
their repulse into a final defeat. Your Government is strength- 
ening you with the resources of a great people. On this our 
nation's birthday we declare to our foes, who are rebels against 
the best interests of mankind, that this army shall enter the 
capital of the so-called Confederacy — that our national consti- 
tution shall prevail, and that the Union, which can alone insure 
internal peace and external security to each State, " must and 



256 LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

shall be preserved," cost what it may in time, treasure, and 
blood. 

George B. McClellan. 

Those alone who believe that by no expenditure whatever 
of " time and treasure and blood" can the Union be preserved 
and the national Constitution be made to prevail, will question 
the fitness of this proclamation to the new position in which 
the Army of the Potomac now found itself. 

Upon the single condition that the Government of the United 
States should redeem the promise given to the army by its 
commander, and truly " strengthen it with the resources of a 
great nation ;" and with better reason than ever before since 
those fatal days of May in which the victory of Hanover Court 
House had been neutrahzed by the withdrawal of General 
McDowell to protect the unimperilled capital of the Union, 
the Army of the Potomac might still hope to enter in triumph 
the " capital of the so-called Confederacy." 

The new base which the army had reached upon the James 
was the base originally designed for it by General McClellan 
in planning his campaign of the Peninsula. This new base 
had been reached, at last, through much tribulation and at the 
cost of many lives of gallant men. But it had been reached ; 
and the army rested upon it unbroken in spirit, with its organ- 
ization unimpaired, and glowing with the consciousness of a 
great sustained and triumphant effort. 

Its true condition on the day when this proclamation was 
issued, was summed up by its commander in the following 
dispatch to the President : 

Headqtjaeters Army of the Potomac, 
Harrison's Bar, James River, July 4, 1863. 
To THE President: — 

I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your dispatch 
of the 2d instant. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 257 

I shall make a stand at this place, and endeavor to give my 
men the repose they so much require. 

After sending my communication on Tuesday, the enemy 
attacked the left of our lines, and a fierce battle ensued, last- 
ing until night ; they were repulsed with great slaughter. Had 
their attack succeeded, the consequences would have Jbeen dis- 
astrous in the extreme. This closed the hard fighting which 
had continued from the afternoon of the 2^th ult., in a daily 
series of engagements, wholly unparalleled ,on this continent 
for determination and slaughter on both sides. 

The mutual loss, in killed and wounded, is enormous. That 
of the enemy certainly greatest. On Tuesday evening, the 
1st, our army commenced its movement from Haxall's to this 
point. Our line of defence there being too extended to be 
maintained by our weakened forces. Our train was immense, 
and about 4 a. m. on the 2d, a heavy storm of rain began, 
which continued during the entire day, and until the forenoon 
of yesterday. 

The road became horrible. Troops, artillery and wagons, 
moved on steadily, and our whole army, men and material, 
was finally brought safe into this camp. The last of the wag- 
ons reached here at noon y^terday. The exhaustion was 
very great, but *the army preserved its morale, and would 
have repelled any attack^ which the enemy was in condition to 
make. 

We now occupy a line of heights about two miles from the 
James, a plain extending from there to the river. Our front 
is about three miles long. These heights command our whole 
position, and must be maintained. The gunboats can render 
valuable support upon both flanks. If the enemy attack us in 
front, we must hold our ground as best we may, and at what- 
ever cost. 

Our positions can be carried only by overwhelming num- 
bers. The spirit of the army is excellent. Stragglers are 
finding their regiments, and the soldiery exhibit the best re- 



258 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGB B. McOLELLAN. 

suits of discipline. Our position is by no means impregnable, 
especially as a morass extends on this side of the high ground, 
from our centre to the James on our right. The enemy may 
attack in vast numbers, and if so, our front will be the scene 
of a desperate battle, which, if lost, will be decisive. Our 
army is fearfully weakened by killed, wounded, and prisoners. 
I cannot now approximate to any statement of our losses, but 
we were not beaten in any conflict. The enemy were unable 
by their utmost efforts to drive us from any field. Never did 
such a change of base, involving a retrograde movement, and 
under incessant attacks from a most determined and vastly 
more numerous foe, partake so little of disorder. We have 
lost no guns, except 25 on the field of battle, 21 of which were 
lost by the giving way of McCall's division under the onset of 
superior numbers. - 

Our communications by the James River are not secure. 
There are points where the enemy can establish themselves 
with cannon or musketry and command the river, and where 
it is not certain that our gunboats can drive them out. In 
case of this, or in case our fi^ont is broken, I will still make 
every effort to preserve at least the personnel of the army, and 
the events of the last few days leave no question that the^ 
troops will do all that their country can ask. Send such rein- 
forcements as you can. I will do what I can. We are ship- 
ping our wounded and sick, and landing supplies. The navy 
department should co-operate with us to the extent of its re- 
sources. Captain Rodgers is doing all in his power, in the 
kindest and most efficient manner. 

When all the circumstances of the case are known, it will be 
acknowledged by all competent judges, that the movement 
just completed by this army is unparalleled in the annals of 
war. Under the most difficult circumstances, we have pre- 
served our trains, our guns, our material, and, above all, our 
honor. 

Geo. B. McClellan, 

Maioi-General. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 259 

To this dispatch the President sent the following reply : 

Washington, July 5, 1862. 9 a. m. 

Maj.-Gen. G. B. McClellan, 

Commanding Army of the Potomac : 

A thousand thanks for the relief your two dispatches of 

12 and 1 p. m. yesterday, gave me. Be assured, the heroism 

and skill of yourself, officers, and men, is and for ever will be 

appreciated. 

If you can hold your present position, we shall hive the 

enemy yet. 

A. Lincoln. 

If by " hiving" the enemy yet, the President meant to im- 
ply capturing the city of Richmond, the substance of his ex- 
cellency's hope was certainly sound, and it was echoed in the 
fears of the enemy themselves. 

With the news of the Confederate victory at Gaines's Mill, 
and of the retreat of the Federal army from its positions im- 
mediately around Richmond, the heart of the beleaguered 
capital had greatly dilated. So complete had been the con- 
centration of the Confederate forces upon the supreme work 
of destroying the Army of the Potomac, and so well were the 
Confederates advised of Stonewall Jackson's astonishing suc- 
cess in deceiving the Federal commanders-in-chief at Wash- 
ington, and thereby in reducing General McClellan to an abso- 
lute dependence upon his own diminished and over-tasked 
strength, that during the six days of incessant battle which 
attended the Federal change of base, few men in Richmond 
suffered themselves to doubt their speedy and utter deliver- 
ance from the foe who had so long insulted and invested their 
city. 

By degrees, however, it began to be whispered that the 
Federal army had not been annihilated ; that McClellan, far 
from being cut to pieces in detail on a disastrous retreat by 
the White House to Yorktown, had siicceeded in effecting the 



260 liPE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

concentration of his whole army at the expense of his depots 
and supphes ; and that, after accomplishing an unexpected ma- 
noeuvre of extreme brilliancy, and after a series of fiercely con- 
tested actions, resulting in terrible slaughter on both sides, but 
in persistent and continuous victory to the arms of the Union, 
the young general of the North had established himself in a 
new position on the river James, more advantageous to him- 
self and more dangerous to Richmond than the positions from 
which his government had permitted him to be driven. 

That his government would repeat with the army at Harri- 
son's Bar the dangerous and so nearly fatal experiments upon 
which it had ventured with the army on the Chickahominy, 
was hardly to be anticipated. 

Reinforcements from all available quarters were accordingly 
ordered up to Richmond by the Confederate authorities. At- 
tempts were made to drive the Federal transports down the 
river. Fort Darling was strengthened, as well as the long line 
of defences stretching from Drewry's Bluff to Manchester. In 
short, while the people of Richmond and the Confederates gen- 
erally rendered all honor to General Lee and to General Jack- 
son for their success in forcing the Federal army to abandon 
its first attack upon their capital, not a little disappointment 
was felt and expressed at their failure to effect the complete 
discomfiture of their antagonists ; and the rebel city prepared 
herself for a new and still more formidable siege. 

On his part General McClellan was encouraged by the Pres- 
ident to believe that the Peninsular movement against Rich- 
mond would now be properly appreciated, and the necessary 
steps taken to secure its success. 

On the 4th of July the President had promised to send him 
at once ten thousand men from the troops around Washington, 
ten thousand from the corps of General Burnside, and five 
thousand from the expeditionary force in South Carolina. 

Though this was but a paltering and insufficient way of 
meeting the emergency,- there being no sound reason whatever 



LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 261 

that could be given why the whole of General Burnside's corps 
and twice ten thousand men from Northern Virginia should not 
at once have been concentrated upon the James, still as it was 
a movement in the right direction, and as it was accompanied 
by the President with an urgent entreaty that General Mc- 
Clellan should save the army by staying where he was if prac- 
ticable, and think of " removal" only if he *' must," General 
McClellan could only infer from it that the President honestly 
meant to aid him in making the supreme effort which all things 
now at last conspired to favor. 

The thought of leaving Harrison's Bar and giving up the 
campaign never for a moment entered his mind. His consulta- 
tions with Flag Officer Goldsborough convinced him that the 
gunboats would be able to keep the river open ; and, working 
assiduously at the fortification of his new position, he found 
himself strong enough by the 7tli of July to telegraph to 
Washington that if not that day attacked he could " laugh at 
the enemy." 

As it was, however, altogether probable that if the enemy 
could muster the necessary force, they would that day attack 
him. General McClellan prepared himself against all contingen- 
cies. He knew that if a battle was fought at Harrison's Bar, it 
would be fought on both sides with desperation, for a defeat 
in that position must be ruin to the vanquished. 

On that day, accordingly. General McClellan wrote to the 
President a most remarkable letter, embodying the ripe results 
of his experience as a commander of the armies of the Union ; 
reasserting those sound principles of military politics which he 
had proclaimed in his first addresses at the head of an army to 
the invaded people of the South, and by which he had strictly 
governed himself and his troops throughout all his campaigns ; 
and urging upon the President with a manly earnestness and 
solemnity of feeling befitting the crisis, the absolute necessity 
of obedience to that first law of order and success in war which 



262 LIFE OP GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

makes unity of authority and concentration of force the indis* 
pensable conditions of victory. 

This letter General McClellan had been asked by the Presi- 
dent in a telegram of June 21st to write. All that had hap- 
pened in the brief fortnight which had since elapsed gave 
treble weight and meaning to its words. Upon what ears 
they fell and how they were answered we shall presently see. 

The following is the letter alluded to : 

Headqtjahters Abmy op the Potomac, 
Camp near Harrison's Landing, Va., July 7, 1862. 
Mk. President, — 

You have been fully informed that the rebel army is in our 
front, with the purpose of overwhelming us by attacking our 
positions or reducing us by blocking our river communications. 
I cannot but regard our condition as critical, and I earnestly 
desire, in view of possible contingencies, to lay before your 
excellency, for your private consideration, my general views 
concerning the existing state of the rebellion, although they 
do not strictly relate to the situation of this army, or strictly 
come within the scope of my official duties. These views 
amount to convictions, and are deeply impressed upon my 
mind and heart. Our cause must never be abandofied ; it is 
the cause of free institutions and self-government. The Con- 
stitution and the Union must be preserved, whatever may be 
the cost in time, treasure or blood. If secession is successful, 
other dissolutions are clearly to be seen in the future. Let 
neither military disaster, political faction, or foreign war, 
shake your settled purpose to enforce the equal operation of 
the laws of the United States upon the people of every State. 

The time has come when the Government must determine 
upon a civil and military policy covering the whole ground of 
our national trouble. The responsibility of determining, de- 
claring, and supporting such civil and military policy, and of 
directing the whole course of national afiairs in regard to the 



^ 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 263 

rebellion must now be assumed and exercised by you, or our 
cause will be lost. The Constitution gives you power suffi- 
cient even for the present terrible exigency. 

This rebellion has assumed the character of war ; as such it 
should be regarded; and it should be conducted upon the 
highest principles known to Christian civilization. It should 
not be a war looking to the subjugation of the people of any 
State in any event. It should not be at all a war upon popu- 
lation, but against armed forces and political organizations. 
Neither confiscation of property, political executions of per- 
sons, territorial organization of States, or forcible abolition of 
slavery should be contemplated for a moment. In prosecuting 
the war, all private property and unarmed persons should be 
strictly protected, subject only to the necessity of military op- 
erations. All private property taken for military use should 
be paid or receipted for ; pillage and waste should be treated 
as high crimes ; all unnecessary trespass sternly prohibited, and 
offensive demeanor by the military towards citizens promptly 
rebuked. Military arrests should not be tolerated, except in 
places where active hostilities exist, and oaths not required by 
enactments constitutionally made, should be neither demanded 
nor received. Military government should be confined to the 
preservation of public order and the protection of political 
rights. Military power should not be allowed to interfere with 
the relations of servitude, either by supporting or impairing 
the authority of the master, except for suppressing disorder, 
as in other cases. Slaves contraband under the act of Congress, 
seeking military protection, should receive it. The right of 
the Government to appropriate permanently to its own service, 
claims to slave labor, should be asserted, and the right of the 
owner to compensation therefor should be recognized. 

This principle might be extended, upon grounds of military 
necessity and security, to all the slaves within a particular 
State, thus working manumission in such State ; and in Mis- 
souri, perhaps in Western Virginia also, and possibly even in 



264 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN, 

Maryland, the expediency of such a measure is only a question 
of time. 

A system of policy thus constitutional and conservative, and 
pervaded by the influences of Christianity and Freedom, would 
receive the support of almost all truly loyal men, would deeply 
impress the rebel masses and all foreign nations, and it might 
be humbly hoped that it would commend itself to the favor of 
the Almighty. 

Unless the principles governing the future conduct of our 
struggle shall be made known and approved, the effort to ob- 
tain requisite forces will be almost hopeless. A declaration of 
radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate 
our present armies. 

The policy of the Government must be supported by con- 
centrations of military power. The national forces should not 
be dispersed in expeditions, posts of occupation, and numerous 
armies, but should be mainly collected into masses, and brought 
to bear upon the armies of the confederate States. Those ar- 
mies thoroughly defeated, the political structure which they 
support would soon cease to exist. 

In carrying out any system of policy which you may form, 
you will require a commander-in-chief of the army ; one who 
possesses your confidence, understands your views, and who is 
competent to execute your orders by directing the military 
forces of the nation to the accomplishment of the objects by 
you proposed. I do not ask that place for myself. I am will- 
ing to serve you in such position as you may assign me, and I 
will do so as faithfully as ever subordinate served superior. 

I may be on the brink of eternity, and as I hope for forgive- 
ness from my Maker, I have written this letter with sincerity 
towards you, and from love of my country. 

Very respectfully, your obedient servant, 

Geokge B. McClellan, 

Maj.-Gen. Com'dg. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 265 

On the 8th of July, the day after this letter was written, the 
President visited Harrison's Bar in person, and discussed with 
General McClellan the whole military situation, coming again 
to the conclusion expressed in his telegrams of July 4th, that 
Richmond was the real point of rebel concentration, and that 
this concentration ought to be met by a similar concentration 
of the Federal forces on the James. The question of the ac- 
tual available force of the Army of the Potomac was also, of 
course, discussed at this time ; and the President went back 
to Washington with the information that the whole force on 
the Peninsula amounted to about 86,000 men. He had scarce- 
ly reached the capital, on his return, when he responded to 
General McClellan's letter of July 7th, by appointing General 
Halleck, on the 11th of July, to the command-in-chief of the 
national armies ; and two days afterwards, on the 13th of July, 
a consultation on the subject of course having been had in the 
interval with the new nominal chief, he sent the following tele- 
gram to General McClellan : 

ExECUTiYE Mansion, Washington, 

July 13, 1863. 
My Dear Sir : — I am told that over 160,000 men have gone 
with your army on the Peninsula. When I was with you the 
other day, we made out 86,000 remaining, leaving 73,500 to 
be accounted for. I believe 23,500 will cover all the killed, 
wounded, and missing, in all your battles and skirmishes, leav- 
ing 50,000 who have left otherwise, and more than 5,000 of 
these have died, leaving 45,000 of your army still alive, and not 
with it. I beheve half or two-thirds of them are fit for duty 
to-day. Have you any more perfect knowledge of this than I 
have ? If I am right, and you had these men with you, you 
could go into Richmond, in the next three days. How can 
they be got to you, and how can they be prevented from get- 
ting away in such numbers for the future ? 

A. Lincoln. 



266 



LIFE OF GEN". GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 



It is difficult to understand what creditable motive can have 
dictated such a telegram as this from a President, who had 
just gone over the whole condition of an army, to the com- 
mander with whom he had gone over it. The implication of 
its most significant clauses clearly was that General McClellan 
was personally responsible for the absence of a large part of 
his effective troops, an implication w^hich the commander-in- 
chief, perfectly well acquainted as he was with the way in 
which the authority to issue furloughs was administered 
among the subordinate officers of the army, a way substan- 
tially endorsed and approved by the government itself, must 
certainly have known to be unjust. Nor can it well be im- 
agined that Mr. Lincoln can have really been at a loss to know 
how the troops, whose absence he deplored " could be got to" 
General McClellan, when he was well aware that among these 
absentees of the Army of the Potomac were whole brigades, 
acting by his own order, under the command of other gene- 
rals, in Northern Virginia ! 

It may be as well to state here, therefore, the officially re- 
corded strength of the Army of the Potomac, including troops 
present with General McClellan, and troops absent from duty 
on the Peninsula under authority conflicting with his own, at 
three different periods : 



PRESENT. 


ABSENT. 


" a 

is 

M 

If 






For Duty. 


Sisk. 


In Arrest or 
Confinement. 


1 




I! 
^1 


1862 
April 30 
June 20 
July 10 


OflB- 
ceri. 


Men. 


Offi- 
cers. 


Men. 


Offi- 
cers. 


Men. 


4,725 
4,665 
3,834 


104,610 
101,160 
85,715 


233 

496 
685 


5,385 
10,641 
15,939 


41 
44 
60 


356 
320 
213 


115,350 
117,226 
105,466 


11,037 
27,700 
34,638 


887 
3,782 


126,387 
145,813 
144,886 


Including Franklin. 

[Dix. 
Including McCall, not 
C Including 2 brigades 
] of Shield's division, 
( about 5,354 men. 



How to get men to the Army of the Potomac, however, 
and how to keep men once got to the Army of the Potomac 
from " getting away" again, were by no means now the lead- 
ing questions which occupied the mind of the President. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 267 

Unless we are to assume that the government at Washing- 
ton has habitually organized, disorganized, and re-organized 
the great armies of the Republic with less thought and care 
than men commonly bestow upon the least important of their 
ordinary business transactions, it must be held to be perfectly 
certain that the President, at the time when he dispatched this 
telegram to General McClellan, had made up his mind to re- 
call from the Peninsula the whole army, which in this tele- 
gram he is made to appear so anxious to see reinforced to such 
a strength as should enable it to " go into Richmond in three 



For here again dates become of grave significance. This 
telegram bears date the 18th of July. 

About a fortnight afterwards, on the 3d of August, no pos- 
itive intimation at variance with the President's implied eager- 
ness to see the Army of the Potomac resume the offensive on 
the Peninsula, having been in the interval communicated to 
General McClellan, even by General Halleck, who had visited 
him in person on the 27th of July, the removal of the army to 
E'orthern Virginia was commanded in the following brief but 
emphatic dispatch : 

''lit is determined to withdraw your army from the Penin- 
sula to Acquia Creek. You will take immediate means to 
effect this, covering the movement the best you can. Its real 
object and withdrawal should be concealed even from your 
own officers." 

All the evidence, indeed, as yet accessible to the public, in 
respect to the military plans and purposes of the commander-in- 
chief of the army at Washington, during the eventful summer 
of 1862, combines to compel the conviction that at no moment 
of the campaign against Richmond did Mr. Lincoln or his 
most confidential advisers ever really abandon their determina- 
tion to avail themselves of every possible occasion for demon- 
strating the soundness of the original presidential plan of that 
campaign as opposed to the plan of General McClellan. It 



268 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

will be remembered that on the 9th of April the President 
telegraphed to General McClellan at Fortress Monroe : 

" I always insisted that going down the bay in search of a 
field instead of fighting at or near Manassas, was only shift- 
ing and not surmounting a difficulty." 

What the President had thus " always insisted on" before 
the campaign of the Peninsula began, he never ceased to insist 
upon during the whole progress of that campaign. 

In obedience to this fixed idea of the President, it was that 
the armies of Banks, McDowell, and Fremont had been con- 
solidated on the 27th of June as the " Army of Virginia." 
Mr. Stanton's telegram to General McClellan, of the 26th of 
June, that this new army would " operate promptly" in his 
aid by land ought to put this question finally at rest. It was 
one consequence of this consolidation that the Army of the 
Potomac was fighting a desperate battle for its very life at 
Gaines's Mill, on the 27th of June, the very day of the pro- 
mulgation of the President's order appointing Major-General 
Pope to the command of the " Army of Virginia ;" and it 
was another consequence of this consolidation that from the 
time of the re-establishment of the Army of the Potomac at 
its new base on the James River, the government had resol- 
ved completely to subordinate the campaign of General Mc- 
Clellan to the campaign of General Pope, and at a proper mo- 
ment to absorb the Army of the Potomac into the new Army 
of Virginia. 

This moment, it was now believed at Washington, had ar- 
rived. 

During the latter part of the month of July, the Confederate 
commanders had begun to prepare themselves for the decision 
which the Federal government announced to General McClel- 
lan on the 3rd of August. Slow as they naturally were to be- 
lieve that the Federal government could commit two such 
gross blunders as to sacrifice the solid advantages which it 
possessed at Harrison's Bar, and to confide its interests and its 



LITE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 269 

hopes in Virginia to an officer so notoriously rash and incom- 
petent as General Pope, the Confederates had yet been gradu- 
nally compelled, by the manoeuvres of the Union forces, to 
believe that this consummation, by themselves so devoutly 
wished, was really reserved for the campaign of 1862. They 
had begun, accordingly, to trifle with the army of General 
Pope, and to make their arrangements for flinging themselves 
in force upon that commander as soon as the evacuation of 
Harrison's Bar should be fairly commenced. 

General Pope himself played into their hands, and accele- 
rated his own ruin by insisting upon it at Washington as a 
fact, of which he was positively assured, that the Confederates, 
smitten with terror by the decisiveness of his advance, and 
fully expecting to be soon driven by him into the James, were 
evacuating Richmond and falling back on Danville and Lynch- 
burg. General McClellan's representations to the contrary 
were disregarded, and General Halleck's order of August 3rd 
was issued. 

Against this order General McClellan protested with all the 
earnestness of a soldier who fully understood the true situation 
of affairs. 

"Your telegram of last evening," he replied to General 
Halleck, " is received. I must confess that it has caused me 
the greatest pain I ever experienced, for I am convinced that 
the order to withdraw this army to Acquia Creek will prove 
disastrous to our cause. 

I fear it will be a fatal blow. 

Several days are necessary to complete the preparations for 
so important a movement as this ; and while they are in pro- 
gress I beg that careful consideration may be given to my 
statements. 

This army is now in excellent discipline and condition. "We 
hold a debouche on both banks of the James River, so that 
we are free to act in any direction, and, with the assistance of 
the gun-boats, I consider our communications as now secure. 



270 . LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE E. McCLELLAN. 

We are (25) twenty-five miles from Richmond, and are not 
likely to meet the enemy in force sufficient to fight a battle, 
until we have marched (15) fifteen to (18) eighteen miles, 
■which brings us practically within (10) ten miles of Richmond. 
Our longest line of land transportation would be from this 
point (25) twenty-five miles; but with the aid of the gun- 
boats we can supply the army by water during its advance, 
certainly to within (12) twelve miles of Richmond. 

At Acquia Creek we would be (75) seventy-five miles from 
Richmond, with land transportation all the way. 

From here to Fort Monroe is a march of about (70) seventy 
miles ; for I regard it as impracticable to withdraw this army 
and its material except by land. 

The result of the movement would thus be a march of (145) 
one hundred and' forty-five miles to reach a point now only 
(25) twenty-five miles distant, and to deprive ourselves entirely 
of the powerful aid of the gun-boats and water transportation. 
Add to this the certain demoralization of this army, which 
would ensue, the terribly depressing effect upon the people of 
the North, and the strong probability that it would influence 
foreign powers to recognize our adversaries, and there appear 
to me sufficient reasons to make it my imperative duty to urge, 
in the strongest terms afforded by our languo.ge, that this 
order may be rescinded, and that, far from recalling this army, 
it be promptly reinforced to enable it to resume the offensive. 

It may be said that there are no reinforcements available. 
I point to Burnside's force, to that of Pope, not necessary to 
maintain a strict defensive in front of Washington and Har- 
per's Ferry, to those portions of the army of the west not 
required for a strict defensive there. Here, directly in front 
of this army, is the heart of the rebellion ; it is here that all 
our resources should be collected to strike the blow which will 
determine the fate of the nation. All points of secondary im- 
portance elsewhere should be abandoned, and every available 
man brought here — a decided victory here, and the military 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 271 

strength of the rebellion is crushed — it matters not what par- 
tial reverses we may meet with elsewhere. Here is the true 
defence of Washington ; it is here, on the banks of the James, 
that the fate of the Union should be decided. 

Clear in my convictions of right, strong in the conscious- 
ness that I have ever been, and still am actuated solely by 
love of my country, knowing that no ambitious or selfish 
motives have influenced me from the commencement of this 
war, I do now, what I never did in my life before, I entreat 
that this order may be rescinded. 

If my counsel does not prevail, I will with a sad heart obey 
your orders to the utmost of my power, directing to the move- 
ment, which I clearly foresee will be one of the utmost delicacy 
and difficulty, whatever skill I may possess. 

Whatever the result may be, and may God grant that I am 
mistaken in my forebodings, I shall at least have the internal 
satisfaction that I have written and spoken frankly, and have 
sought to do the best in my power to avert disaster from my 
country. ' 

G. B. McClellan, 

Maj.-Gen. Comd'g. 

This appeal was made in vain. In an elaborate reply to it 
General Halleck assumed the responsibility of ordering the 
withdrawal of the army from Harrison's Bar while he admit- 
ted that he had " tried every means in his power to avoid 
withdrawing it." 

How wise this reluctance was on the part of General Hal- 
leck, and how fatal his final decision, events were not long in 
convincing all the world. 

The one substantial reason on which General Halleck, in his 
letter to General McClellan, rested his decision, was the fact 
that " the old Army of the Potomac was now split into two 
parts, with the entire force of the enemy between them." 
" They cannot be united by land," General Halleck went on to 



272 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

say, " without exposing both to destruction, and yet they must 
be united. To send Pope's forces by water to the Peninsula 
is, under present circumstances, a military imjDossibihty. The 
only alternative is to send the forces on the Peninsula to some 
point by water, say Fredericksburg, where the two armies can 
be united." 

In the face of the subsequent history of the war it is proba- 
ble that General Halleck would hardly care to admit that he 
felt himself shut down to this solitary alternative by the force 
of purely military considerations. To do so would be to con- 
vict himself of an absolute incapacity for the conduct of a great 
campaign. The real impossibility of sending General Pope's 
forces by water to the Peninsula, as General Halleck well 
knew, was not a military, but a political impossibility, it was 
the political impossibility of permitting General McClellan 
completely to prove, by the capture of Richmond in August, 
how Richmond might have been captured in May, had the 
" overland" theory on w^hich his excellency, the commander- 
in-chief, had from the first " insisted," been frankly abandoned. 

General HaUeck repeating peremptorily his orders for the 
removal of the army, there w^as nothing left for General Mc- 
Clellan but to obey them. 

The wharf facilities at Harrison's Landing were very limited, 
nor could the heaviest transport steamers come up so high on 
the James River ; and the chief quartermaster. Colonel Ingalls, 
reported to General McClellan on the 7th, that after the trans- 
ports already engaged by order of General Halleck, in moving 
the sick and wounded, should have returned, it would be pos- 
sible to move at one time 25,000 men <jf the Army of the 
Potomac, but that in the actual condition of the transportation 
that day available, it w^ould be impossible to move more than 
5,000 infantry. He accordingly advised the sending forward 
of the troops to Fortress Monroe, and their shipment from 
that point. All that could be done was done to accelerate the 
movement, but from the moment when it began General Mo- 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 21 3 

Clellan was plied with telegrams from General Halleck re- 
proaching him for his alleged delay in executing the order of 
removal, telegrams which are interesting to the student of this 
campaign only as they reveal the positively hostile feeling of 
the authorities at Washington towards the recalled comman- 
der. 

On the 9th of August, for example, three days after his final 
orders had been given for the removal of the army, General 
Halleck telegraphed : — 

Maj.-Gen. McClellan, 

I am of opinion that the enemy is massing his forces in front 
of Generals Pope and Burnside, and that he expects to crush 
them and move forward to the Potomac. You must send 
reinforcements instantly to Acquia Creek. 

Considering the amount of transportation at your disposal, 
your delay is not satisfactory, you must move with all possible 
celerity. 

H. W. Halleck, 

Major-General. 

On the next day, August 10th, the general-in-chief tele- 
graphed again, " the enemy is crossing the Rapidan in large 
force. They are fighting General Pope to-day; there must be 
no further delay in your movements. That which has already 
occurred was entirely unexpected and must be satisfactorily 
explained." 

The enemy was indeed crossing the Rapidan in large force 
and " fighting General Pope." Having learned early in August, 
as in some mysterious manner they always learned them, the 
military decisions come to by the Auhc Council at Washing- 
ton,, the Confederates had forthwith seized their opportunity, 
and were precipitating the main body of their army upon the 
headlong commander of the " Army of Virginia." As General 
McClellan had never been notified of the intention of the 



274 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEaE B. McCLELLAN. 

government to transfer his army northward until the 3rd of 
August, and had never been finally commanded to execute 
that intention until the 6th of August, this refusal to him 
of proper confidence had resulted in giving the Con- 
federates, operating upon interior lines and by railway, 
such an advantage over the two armies of the Union in 
point of time, as could not possibly have been neutralized 
had the transportation service at Harrison's Bar been as 
perfect as General Halleck, in these imperious and insult- 
ing telegrams assumed it to be. But that service, as we 
have seen, was far from being at all adequate to the sudden 
demand now made upon it. On the 10th of August the ofiSicer 
in charge of the quartermaster's department at Harrison's Bar 
compelled General Halleck to retract the substance of his 
charges of " delay" by a despatch confirming General McClel- 
lan's statement that the capacity of the transportation service 
of the Army of the Potomac had been entirely exhausted by 
the demands made on it for the movement of the sick and 
wounded, and of General Burnside's heavy artillery. It was, 
furthermore, to have been supposed that as General Halleck 
had expressly requested General McClellan to keep his move- 
ment " a secret from his own officers and men," the necessary 
transportation service would have been prepared at Washing, 
ton. But the miserably petty nature of these charges cannot 
be better shown than it is by the fact that while General Mc- 
Clellan was now taken sharply to task for failing to send for- 
ward ninety thousand men to the Rappahannock from an ex- 
peditionary base of operations on the James .^'ithin four days 
from the date of the final order requiring him to do so, 
the war department itself had occupied more than a week 
in sending forward five thousand men from the great national 
base of supplies to the James River. On the 5th of June Mr. 
Stanton had telegraphed to General McClellan, " I will send 
you five regiments as fast as transportation can take them." 
These regiments joined the army on the 12th and 13th of June. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 275 

To move the Army of the Potomac safely from Harrison's 
Bar to Acquia Creek and Alexandria, with such facilities as 
were supplied to General McClellan, was the p' oper work of a 
month at least. Anxious that no unnecessary delays should 
occur, either in embarking or disembarking his men, General 
McClellan, on the 12th of August, went in person seventy 
miles to the telegraph office at Jamestown Island, and sent a 
telegram to General Halleck, announcing his wish to confer 
with him on such subjects as the following : 

" I learn that wharf accommodations at Acquia are altogether 
inadequate for landing troops and supplies to any large extent. 
Not an hour should be lost in remedying this. Great delays 
will ensue there from shallow water. You will find a vast 
deficiency in horse transports ; we had nearly (200) two hun- 
dred when we came here. I learn of only (20) twenty pro- 
vided now ; they carry about (50) fifty horses each. More 
hospital accommodations should be provided. We are much 
impeded here because our wharves are used night and day to 
land current supplies. At Monroe a similar difficulty will 
occur. With all the facilities at Alexandria and Washington, 
(6) six weeks about were occupied in embarking this army and 
its material." 

General Halleck telegraphed from Washington : 

Washington, Aug. 14, 1862. 1.40 a. m. 
I have read your dispatch. There is no change of plans. 
You will send up your troops as rapidly as possible. There is 
no difficulty in landing them. According to your own ac- 
counts there is now no difficulty in withdrawing your forces. 
Do so with all possible rapidity. 

H. W. Halleck, 

Maj.-Gen. 

Immediately after sending this reply. General Halleck left 
the Washington Office without informing General McClellan 
of the fact, or waiting for any further communication from 



276 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

him, thus insolently signifying his profound indifference to the 
wishes, the counsels and the feelings of the officer to whom, 
within a brief fortnight, he was destined to be indebted for 
his deliverance from the chaos of danger and despair into 
which the Aulic council and himself were now rapidly hurry- 
ing the affairs of the state. 

Late in the afternoon of the 16th of August, when the last 
soldier had left the deserted camp, General McClellan and his 
personal staff bade farewell to the spot upon which he had 
planted the banner of the Union in such a formidable proximity 
to the rebel capital as since that day no army of the United 
States ha& occupied. 

Part of his troops moving by land on Yorktown and Fortress 
Monroe, and part descending the James River, the commander 
'•of the Army of the Potomac had thus pushed forward his 
ninety thousand men to the relief of General Pope within a 
fortnight's time from his receipt of the first positive intimation 
that such a movement would be required of him. 

On the 24th of August, three weeks after this intimation 
had reached him, General McClellan reported for orders at 
Acquia Creek. The corps of General Porter ; pushed forward 
through the tangled wilderness of the Peninsula with unsur- 
passed rapidity by that officer, on his learning, by a letter inter 
cepted at Williamsburgh, that the enemy were massing them- 
selves tremendously against Pope ; had reached Northern Vir- 
ginia two days before, and was already in the front of battle 
endeavoring to ascertain where the commander of the " Army 
of Virginia" really was, and what his plans of action were. 



CHAPTER XI. 

THE REMOVAL TO ACQUIA CREEK. THE FAILURE OF POPE'S CAMPAIGN. 
GENERAL McCLELLAN TAKES CHARGE OP THE ARMY. THE CAM- 
PAIGN OP MARYLAND. 

The history of the eventful week which followed the arrival 
of General McClellan at Acquia Creek in August, 1862, can- 
not be adequately set forth within the limits of this volume. 
That week was such a carnival of incapacity as the world has 
seldom seen. The Aulic council at Washington and their fa- 
vorite commander in the field, General Pope, had now invited 
upon themselves precisely such a blow as that which they had 
enabled the enemy a month before to deliver upon the Army 
of the Potomac. 

Recalling General McClellan from Harrison's Bar, they had 
liberated Lee for a campaign in the North. So swift had been 
the movements of the Confederate general, and so stolidly 
stubborn were the Aulic council and General Pope in the be- 
lief that Lee was not moving at all, that the Federal " Army 
of Virginia" was struck by his decisive advance after the 18th 
of August as by a thunderbolt. Beaten wherever he was 
found, utterly bewildered by the manoeuvres of his enemy, 
and clinging firmly to the one notion which happened to be of 
all notions possible to him the most dangerously erroneous, 
that he was dealing not with the main body of the rebel forces 
but with a flying column. General Pope had so completely en- 
tangled himself with his own line of operations, that when 



278 LIFE OF GEN. GEOKGE B. McCLELLAN. 

General McClellan arrived at Acquia Creek and telegraphed to 
General Halleck for information as to the whereabouts of Gen- 
eral Pope and as to his own future position and responsibili- 
ties, the general-in-chief could only reply ignominiously enough : 
" You ask me for information which I cannot give. I do not 
know either where General Pope is or where the enemy in 
force is. These are matters which I have been all day most 
anxious to ascertain." 

Matters worth knowing to a general-in-chief these certainly 
were ; but the legitimate curiosity of General Halleck was 
destined to be gratified only by the newdy-arrived general upon 
whom he had been unable to find time, ten days before, to 
bestow the commonest courtesies of official life. 

On the 27 th of August General Halleck again telegraphed 
to General McClellan : " I can get no satisfa^ctory information 
from the front, either from the enemy or our troops. There 
seems to have been great neglect and carelessness about Ma- 
nassas. Franklin's corps should march in that direction as 
soon as possible. A competent officer should be sent out to 
take the direction of affiiirs in that vicinity." Of the com- 
mander of the " Army of Virginia" he telegraphed on the 
same day this astounding piece of information : " Pope's head- 
quarters are at Warrenton Junction, but I cannot ascertain 
the present position of his troops !" 

A " competent officer" was evidently needed still nearer the 
headquarters of the army. Two days afterward General 
McClellan was again applied to for information concerning the 
army which he had been displaced from command to reinforce, 
and this time by the President himself, who had given that 
army its being, and had himself selected its commanding offi- 
cer. The President's telegram is quite pathetic in its utter 
helplessness : 
Maj.-Gen. McClellan, — 

What news from Manassas Junction ? What, generally ? 

Abraham Lincoln. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 2*79 

Kow in these four days of utter bewilderment and despair 
at the headquarters of the army in Washington, General 
McClellan had received from those headquarters an abundance 
of contradictory and for the most part flagrantly inexecutable 
orders, emanating sometimes from the gallopping headquarters 
of the Army of Virginia, and sometimes from the befogged 
administration of the war office. Precisely what forces he 
commanded, or whether he still held any command at all, he 
was utterly unable to ascertain. 

To move any troops to the assistance of General Pope, unless 
in such force and under such conditions as should enable them 
to make an independent fight of their own, was clearly to ex- 
pose the army to annihilation, for General Pope had completely 
lost all conception of anything like a general plan of operations. 
On the 23d of August he had burned Rappahannock Station 
without giving any notice to Generals Morell and Sykes, of 
General Porter's corps, who were then watching the fords of 
the Lower Rappahannock; and on the 27th of August he had 
destroyed Gen. Taylor's New Jersey Brigade by flinging it 
into the face of a whole Confederate army corps at Bull Run, 
under the firm belief that he was marching it against a scout- 
ing party of cavalry. 

Such was the utter incoherence of the operations of General 
Pope indeed, and so feverish the alternation of senseless con- 
fidence and equally senseless alarm at Washington, that both 
the capital and the army must have been sacrificed, had a less 
clear-headed ofiicer or one of less moral courage in the face of 
an ill-defined responsibility and an imminent peril, occupied 
the anomalous position held by General McClellan at Alexan- 
dria, whither he had been summoned nominally to superintend 
the forwarding of troops to General Pope, but really, as the 
President in another lamentable telegram of August 29th had 
notified him, to " assist General Halleck by his counsels in 
controlling affairs." 

This telegram was sent in reply to one from General Mc- 



280 LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

Clellan, calling upon the President to decide upon one of two 
courses, and either to concentrate all the available forces not 
yet involved by General Pope in his ibewildered retreat, for 
the purpose of opening communications with that general ; or 
to abandon the attempt to ascertain what General Pope was 
trying to do with his army, and to concentrate upon Washing- 
ton, making the capital safe as a place of refuge for Pope's 
beaten forces, and as the base of new operations to recover 
the ground lost by him. 

The President, who had been so eager to act as commander- 
in-chief, when the skies seemed to be clear and auspicious of 
victory, shrank from his duty now, and threw the responsibility 
of action upon General Halleck, his nominal general-in-chief, 
and upon General McClellan, whom he had just deprived of 
his army. 

In the exercise of this somewhat vaguely defined authority, 
General McClellan ventured to save the forces under General 
Franklin and General Sumner from marching out, as General 
Halleck had ordered them to do, quite in the dark, and in an 
inadequate state of preparation against an enemy of unknown 
strength. For doing this he was reprimanded at the time by 
General Halleck, and has since been frequently taken to task 
by the partisans of the administration. But nothing is more 
certain than that an immediate and unquestioning execution of 
General Halleck's first, and by no means peremptory, direc- 
tions in regard to these forces would simply have involved 
them in the disastrous finale of General Pope's campaign, 
which culminated in the second battle of Bull Run, fought on 
the 30th of August; and that Washington itself would, in 
that event, have been exposed, in a state of absolute helpless- 
ness, to the triumphant Confederates. 

How this battle of Bull Run was fought and lost can only be 
understood from a careful study of two reports not now fairly 
accessible to the public, the reports of General Fitz-John 
Porter and of General Sykes. 



LIFE OP GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 281 

Suffice it to say, that at two o'clock in the afternoon of that 
fatal day General McClellan was telegraphed to from Wash- 
ington to send forward " ammunition for artillery" to General 
Pope, he having neither ammunition wagons nor even any in- 
formation as to the calibre of Pope's artillery. When it is re- 
membered that General Pope's army had been organized at 
Washington in the month of June ; that its commander had 
been in high favor with the authorities at Washington, and in 
direct communication with them until, by his own signal in- 
capacity, he had involved himself helplessly in the toils of 
Longstreet and of Lee ; and that General McClellan had 
reached Alexandria a deposed commander, under the cloud of 
official displeasure, only three days before this second battle of 
Bull Kun was delivered, it must be admitted that no such 
tribute has ever been paid to the military genius of a comman- 
der as is paid to that of General McClellan by those friends of 
the administration, who insist that he ought to have been able 
to intervene at the eleventh hour without a soldier at his back, 
or a ray of official light on his path, between the distracted 
forces of General Pope and the ruin upon which their leader 
was hurrying them ! 

This of course he could not do, nor was he permitted to do 
what alone he could have done and what he earnestly desired 
to do, pass to the front with his old soldiers of the Potomac 
and share their fate with them. 

Late on the night of August 30th, as the tidings of Pope's 
complete overthrow began to come in, General McClellan tele- 
graphed to General Halleck : 

" I cannot express to you the pain and mortification I have 
experienced to-day in listening to the distant sound of the 
firing of my men. As I can be of no further use here, I re- 
spectfully ask that if there is a probability of the conflict being 
renewed to-morrow, I may be permitted to go to the scene of 
battle with ray staff, merely to be with my own men, if noth. 
ing more ; they will fight none the worse for my being with 



282 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

them. If it is not deemed best to intrust me with the command 
even of my own army, I simply ask to be permitted to share 
their fate on the field of battle. Please reply to this to-night. 

" I have been engaged for the last few hours in doing what 
I can to make arrangements for the wounded. I have started 
out all the ambulances now landed." 

General Halleck replied the next morning that he could give 
no orders, as '' General Pope was in command of the depart- 
ment." On the previous day, indeed, at the very moment 
when the Army of Virginia was falling to pieces in General 
Pope's incompetent hands, the secretary of war had issued an 
order giving General Burnside command of his own corps, 
giving General Pope " command of the Army of Virginia and of 
all forces temporarily attached to it," and giving General McClel- 
lan command of " that portion of the Army of the Potomac 
not sent forward to General Pope's command," the whole Army 
of the Potomac being then nnder orders to join General Pope ! 

This was on the 30th of August. At ten o'clock of the 
next night, August 31st, the general-in-chief, Halleck, was tele- 
graphing to the commander thus derided and insulted twenty- 
four hours before : 

*' I beg of you to assist me with yoiir ability and experience. 
I am entirely tired out." 

No thought but his country in his mind. General McClellan 
responded at once to this Macedonian cry. At midnight of 
the 31st, learning that the rebel cavalry were on the Fairfax 
road, that the right wing of Pope's beaten army was entirely 
exposed, and that his whole left wing had been that day driven 
in, he telegraphed to Washington : 

*' I recommend that no more of Couch's division be sent to 
.the front, that Burnside be brought here as soon as practica- 
ble, and that everything available this side of Fairfax be drawn 
in at once, including the mass of the troops on the railroad. I 
apprehend that the enemy will, or have by this time, occupied 
Fairfax Court House, and cut off Pope entirely, unless he falls 



LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McdLELLAN. 283 

back to-night, via Sangster's and Fairfax Station. I think 
these orders should be sent at once. I have no confidence in 
the dispositions made, as I gather them. To speak frankly, 
and the occasion requires it, there appears to be a total absence 
of brains, and I fear the total destruction of the army. I have 
some cavaliy here that can carry out any orders you may have 
to send. The occasion is grave, and demafids grave measures. 
The question is the salvation of the country. I learn that our 
loss yesterday amounted to fifteen thousand (15,000).* We 
cannot afford such losses without an object. It is my deliber- 
ate opinion that the interests of the nation demand that Pope 
should fall back to-night, if possible, and not one moment is to 
be lost. I will use all the cavalry I have, to watch our right. 
Please answer at once. I feel confident you can rely upon the 
information I give you. I shall be up all night, and ready to 
obey any orders you give me." 

A¥ithin an hour General Halleck had responded, acquiescing 
in General McClellan's suggestions, authorizing him to " esta- 
blish an outer line of defence," and begging him for more " re- 
liable news." Such news was indeed desirable — for at 4 P. M. 
of this very day General Pope had contrived to. get word to 
Washington that he " was all right !" 

On the next day, September 1st, General McClellan was 
sent for, to come to Washington and take command of the de- 
fences, his command to be strictly limited to the garrison of 
the works. He accepted the duty thus ungraciously thrust 
upon him ; but suggested that General Halleck should send 
out some "reliable" person to ascertain whether General Pope 
was indeed " all right." 

The general-in-chief sent one of his own staff; and shortly 
after requested General McClellan to come to his headquarters 
to meet the President. Utterly prostrated by the disasters 
which he had brought upon the country, the President had 

* This was equal to the whole loss of the army in the " Seven Days* 
battles" before Kichmond. 



284 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

suflfered himself to be persuaded into insulting the whole army 
of the Potomac by supposing that its soldiers, angry at the 
injustice done their commander, were not cheerfully co-operat- 
ing with General Pope. Unnerved, and tremulous with emo- 
tion, he assured General McClellan that he had " always been 
his friend," and begged him to telegraph to " Fitz-John Por- 
ter, or some other of his friends," and try to do away with the 
alleged reluctance of the Potomac Army to act with Pope. 
General McClellan, as positively as was consistent with a pro- 
per respect for the President's official station, assured him of 
the gross absurdity and indecency of these allegations : but 
finding that nothing less would calm the perturbed spirit of 
the commander-in-chief, he finally sent a telegram to General 
Fitz-John Porter, urging him, for his own sake and that of the 
country and of the old Army of the Potomac, to " lend the. 
fullest and most cordial co-operation to General Pope." Of 
course General Porter replied that he and all the Army of the 
Potomac had done, were doing, and would always do, their 
duty as soldiers of the Republic. 

It is a lamentable illustration of the rancorous and petty na- 
ture of partisan passion, that this telegram, wrung from Gen- 
eral McClellan by the entreaties and almost by the tears of 
the President, and acknowledged at the time by the latter as a 
" service he should never forget," has been since adduced as a 
proof that General McClellan had bewitched the officers and 
soldiers of the Army of the Potomac out of their allegiance to 
the nation. 

On the next morning, September 2d, General Halleck's mes- 
senger returned with authentic news of General Pope's hu- 
miliating defeat, and of the utter confusion in which his army 
was retreating. Upon this the President came in person, with 
General Halleck, to General McClellan's house, and begged 
him to go out, meet, and take command of the retreating 
array, to organize the defence of the capital, and in short to 
act as generalissimo once again — for the salvation of the State. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 285 

Upon this moment of the conduct of the war hung its whole 
future fortunes. Never before nor since has it been so vitally- 
important to the national honor, to the safety of the capital, 
to the very existence of the national government, that the 
command of the armies of the Union should be lodged in the 
hands of a man perfectly loyal, perfectly sound of heart and 
clear of brain, as it was on this second day of September, 1862. 

The defeat of McDowell at the first battle of Bull Run had 
for a time imperilled all these things. But the victors of July 
21st, 1862, were raw troops, and the Confederate Government 
of that day was a raw government, with an undeveloped poHcy 
before it and an unconsolidated people behind it. The con- 
querors of General Pope, on the contrary, were the veterans 
of a year of battles, flushed with the successful defence of the 
rebel capital, and with the triumphs not of one or two insig- 
nificant skirmish fields, but of a whole campaign in Northern 
Virginia ; while the policy of the Confederate Government 
was now beginning to acquire a certain positiveness and cohe- 
sion, and the people of the Confederate States to feel them- 
selves in some sort committed as a nation to war. 

The selection by the Government at Washington of General 
McClellan for the command of the army in July, 1861, is ex- 
cused by those who pronoimce that officer's career to have 
been " a failure," on the grounds that he was recommended 
by his recent success in Western Virginia, that the Government 
knew as much of him as of any one of its generals, and that 
the time was necessarily a season of experiments. 

No such excuse can be given for his re-selection in Septem- 
ber, 1862. Then the government knew more of him than of 
any of its other generals ; then he was recommended by the 
untoward conclusion of the siege of Richmond ; then to risk 
experiments was a crime. 

When, on the 2d of September, 1862, the President and 
General Halleck — the commander-in-chief who " could order 
what he pleased," and the general-iu-chief whom he had him- 



286 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

self selected — put the whole power of the state into the hands 
of Major-General McClellan they by that act distinctly ab- 
solved him of all responsibility for the national disappointment 
before Richmond, and as distinctly acknowledged their full 
sense of his superiority as a commander, not merely to them- 
selves but to all the generals whose services were within their 
disposal. 

The accredited biographer of Mr. Lincoln declares it to be his 
belief that General McClellan was unfitted for command either 
because he "intentionally avoided decisive engagements in 
order to accomplish certain political results which he and his 
secret political advisers deemed desirable," or because he was, 
" by the native constitution of his mind, unable to meet the 
gigantic responsibilities of his position when the critical mo- 
ment of trial arrived." 

If either of these hypotheses be well-founded, it is needless 
to say, that whatever judgment posterity may pass upon Gene- 
ral McClellan, there can be no doubt as to its verdict upon the 
President of the United States, and the general- in-chief who 
thus flung all the military responsibilities of these positions 
upon the shoulders of General McClellan at the moment when 
these responsibilities were most " gigantic," and when most 
a man decisive of temper and resolute in action was needed to 
meet them ! 

Of one rare and great quality, at least. General McClellan 
on this memorable 2d of September, proved himself to be pos- 
sessed. "One single thing," says a brilliant writer,* "has 
been lacking to Italy, a thing in appearance humble, but in 
reality of all things the greatest — honesty ! * * * * * 
Patriotism itself has been unscrupulous in Italy ; her most vir- 
tuous citizens have professed their disdain for the human 
species, and have acted upon the principle, that as the world 
is peopled by fools one must ape madness in order to rule it. 

*Renan. "Les Revolutions d'ltalie." Essais de Morale et de Cri 
tique. Paris, 1859, pp. 367-8. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. MoCLELLAlT. 287 

* * * There have been reactions against this strange 
eclipse of the moral sense, but no where in Italian history do 
I find a St. Louis, a Washington or a Lafayette. These, the 
Italian will tell us, were not masters of policy, they were simply 
honest men. Perhaps so, but would to heaven, for Italy's 
sake, that she had possessed more of these timorous con- 
sciences and these narrow minds !" 

"Without a comment on his treatment in the past, or a condi- 
tion to secure justice in the future, this young general, before 
whom power thus prostrated itself with all the temptations 
which official imbecility has ever offered to vaulting ambition, 
accepted the command of the armies, not even exacting its 
formal transmission into his hands. 

Getting at once into the saddle, he rode out to meet the re- 
treating forces. He came upon General Pope in person at no 
great distance from the capital, but could learn nothing fi'om 
him as to the position either of the enemy or of his own men. 
It was not till long after nightfall that he succeeded in gain- 
ing such a definite idea of the condition of things as enabled 
him to begin to issue his orders. But his re-appearance at the 
head of affairs was the signal of such a sudden and astounding 
change in the morale of the retreating troops as proved that 
these stout soldiers of the Peninsula, at least, fully understood 
the difference between the deliberate retreat of a skilful and 
successful general, constrained by circumstances, not of his own 
creating, to change his positions, and the rout of an army 
sacrificed by the incompetency of its commander. The troops 
everywhere hailed him with cheers ; the disorganized battal- 
ions, as if by magic, became a formidable host again ; and 
before midnight, on the 2d of September, Washington was 
once more safe against any attack of the enemy. 

The ulterior plans of Lee now began to develop themselves. 
His movements on the 3d of September indicated to General 
McClellan his intention of crossing the upper Potomac, and 
carrying the war into Maryland and Pennsylvania. 



288 LIFE or GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

General Halleck and the administration could not believe 
this possible, and urged a strictly defensive policy upon the 
soldier in whose hands the hope of the nation once more 
rested. But General McClellan, governed by sounder princi- 
ples, determined at once upon an aggressive movement. In 
four days he had re-organized the army sufficiently to enable 
him to take the field, had put General Banks in command at 
Washington, and was marching in watchful pursuit of the 
enemy. 

The same authorities who had harassed his operations dur- 
ing the spring and summer with incessant charges of " slow- 
ness" and " delay" now began to torment him with suggestions 
that he was moving too fast and too far. 

On the 9th of September General Halleck earnestly warned 
him against an attempt of the enemy to attack Washington 
from " the Virginia side." On the 12th the President was 
sure that the enemy was " recrossing the Potomac," and urged 
General McClellan not to " let him get off without being hurt." 
On the 13th General Halleck scolded him for " uncovering the 
capital," as he was sure that the " enemy would suddenly move 
on Washington with the forces south of the Potomac," and on 
the 14th the same officer feared that he was " exposing his left 
and rear." 

We know now that on the 9th of September General Lee 
issued orders to his army to " resume its march, taking the 
Hagerstown road. * * * General Jackson to take the 
route towards Sharpsburg, cross the Potomac, take possession 
of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, capture such of the enemy 
as may be at Martinsburg, and intercept such as may attempt 
to escape from Harper's Ferry." This at the time General 
McClellan did not know, but with only his own military judg- 
ment to guide him, and under a constant fire of discouraging 
and delusive telegrams from Washington, he divined the truth 
and pressed on. How much the country owes him for his 
self-possession, self-reliance and energy at this juncture of 



UFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLA:Nr. 289 

events can only be fairly estimated by those who will give 
themselves the pains to reflect on the consequences which 
must have followed had he bowed to the President's assurance 
of September 12th, that the enemy was going back to Virginia, 
an assurance given, as it chanced, at the very moment when 
Stonewall Jackson was appearing in force before Harper's 
Ferry. 

The disgraceful surrender of Harper's Ferry by Colonel 
Miles and Colonel Ford almost immediately followed, the 
post being given up to the Confederates at eight, A. M., on 
the 15th of September. The garrison there had not been put 
under the orders of General McClellan until the 12th, by which 
time all communication between himself and the Ferry had 
been cut off. But he had at once ordered General Franklin 
to its relief, and this ofiicer, at the moment of the surrender, 
was actually within three miles of the position of Maryland 
Heights, and within seven miles of Harper's Ferry, at a point 
in Pleasant Valley where his advance had rested the night 
before from the combat and victory of Crampton's Gap. 

On the same day with the combat at Crampton's Gap, the 
battle of South Mountain was fought and won for the posses- 
sion of Turner's Gap. In this battle, one of the best contested 
of the war, about 30,000 men were engaged on each side. 
Here fell General Reno, in whom, says the commander, " the 
nation lost one of its best general ofiicers." 

The President acknowledged the tidings of this victory in 
the following characteristic manner : — 

War Department, 
Washington, Sept. 15, 1863—2.45 P. M. 
Your despatch of to-day received. God bless you, and all 
with you. Destroy the rebel army if possible. 

A. Lincoln. 
To Maj.-Gen. McClellan. 

The "rebel army" which the victors of South Mountain 



29Q lilFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

were thus requested to " destroy," was the same army, it will 
be remembered, which had destroyed Pope's " Army of Vir- 
ginia," and thrown the capital at Washington into a paroxysm 
of terror. The army invited to "destroy" it was an army 
which had become almost a mob but a fortnight before, and 
which had only been brought and held together, in the advance 
upon a victorious enemy, by the moral power which the name 
and the character of its commanding general exerted upon the 
men. 

Two days afterward was fought the signal battle of Antietam 
Creek, near Sharpsburg, by which the whole Confederate plan 
of campaign was broken up ; Maryland and Pennsylvania were 
delivered from the presence and the terror of the foe ; and the 
triumphant and aggressive enemy, driven across the Potomac, 
was put once more upon the defensive. Never before had two 
such armies contended for victory on a single field in the new 
world. For fourteen hours nearly two hundred thousand men 
and five hundred pieces of artillery had shaken the solid earth, 
with their thunder of battle, among the Maryland hills. 

The position of the Confederates was one of unusual 
strength. General Lee, thrown upon the defensive by the de- 
termined advance of General McClellan, had fixed himself here 
with the hope that the army of the Union, still suffering, as 
he well knew, from the demoralizing influences of Pope's re- 
cent campaign, worn down by a week of incessant marching 
and by two days of almost incessant fighting, and separated 
from its supply trains, would be dashed to pieces in its on- 
slaught upon his lines ; in which case, holding his communica- 
tions open with Virginia, he might be rapidly reinforced and 
supplied, and resume his advance upon the North unobstruct- 
ed by any formidable force. 

To overcome and destroy the powerful army thus posted 
with the army then actually in his hand. General McClellan 
could not expect. It would require his utmost efforts, he 
knew, so to cripple Lee as to drive him back into Virginia. 



/ 



i 




LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. MeCLELLAN. 291 

This accomplished, it was certain that the Confederates, re- 
crossing the Potomac, would make a fresh stand at the first 
available point, and safely defy pursuit until the exhausted 
army of the Union should have had time to reorganize itself 
for a new campaign of invasion. 

The battle of Antietam, then, was on the part of the Union 
forces an offensive-defensive battle, and on the part of the 
Confederates a defensive-offensive battle. It was the culmi- 
nating effort of General McClellan to drive from the Northern 
soil an enemy against whom the government had avowed 
itself but three weeks before quite powerless to make head. 
With General Lee, on the contrary, who had had time to 
choose his position, it was an effort to dispose of the only re- 
maining obstacle in his hitherto victorious progress from 
Richmond towards Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia. 

Under these conditions the action began at daylight on the 
17th of September, 1862, with a vigorous assault upon the 
enemy's left by the right wing of General McClellan's army, 
which was to have been followed up by a similar assault of the 
Union left wing upon the right of the Confederates. The 
centre of the Union lines was held by two divisions of General 
Porter's corps, the divisions of Generals Sykes and Morell, 
which had suffered so severely under General Pope in the sec- 
ond battle of Bull Run. These divisions constituted the only 
real reserves of the army, filled the interval between the right 
and left wings, and protected the supply trains of the army in 
the rear. It was of course greatly important that the front 
of this force should be maintained firmly in any event, and 
more particularly that it should be so maintained in the event 
of any failure on the part of either of the Federal wings to 
make a due impression upon the enemy. 

The attack of the Federal right began at the hour appoint- 
ed, and was pushed with promising success. At 8 o'clock 
General Burnside, commanding on the left, was ordered for- 
ward in his turn to carry an important part of the heights on 



292 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. MCCLELLA2T. 

the enemy's right. This order was not obeyed until nearly 
noon, and its object having been partially achieved, General 
Biirnside halted his advance until 3 o'clock in the afternoon. 
During this inaction of the left Aving the conflict had raged 
vrith great fury on the right ; several general officers had 
fallen, and so severe had been the losses of that wing that two 
brigades of General Porter's corps, already weakened by de- 
tachments to the right and rear of Burnside, were ordered up 
from the centre to reinforce it, at the risk of exposing that 
vital position to attack. 

Under repeated orders from General McClellan, General 
Burnside at length resumed his attack, carried the heights 
upon the enemy's right and drove his men from their guns. 
But this advantage, which, had it been won three hours be- 
fore, might have gone far towards rendering the victory more 
decisive than there had been any antecedent reason for be- 
lieving that it could be made, was won too late. The enemy, 
reinforced just before dusk by Jackson's troops from Harper's 
Ferry, assailed Burnside in his turn, and forced him back from 
the crest upon the lower range of hills near the bridge which 
he had carried at noon. 

Night, however, closed upon a victory which had saved the 
North from invasion and the nation from humiliation. Thir- 
teen guns, thirty-nine stand of colors, upwards of fifteen thou- 
sand stand of small arms, and more than six thousand prison- 
ers, attested the brilliancy of the triumph — a brilliancy un- 
dimmed by the loss of a Federal color or a Federal gun. 

To renew the attack on the next day, in the then condition 
of the troops, was pronounced impossible by the corps and 
divisional commanders, and the Confederates sending in a flag 
of truce for permission to bury their dead, the permission was 
granted, and the day spent in preparations for resuming the 
ofi*ensive on the following morning. 

But during the night of the 18 th, Lee, whose position, almost 
on the river bank, gave him great facility for the manoeuvre, 



LITE OF GEN. GEOEGB B. McCLELLAN. 293 

evacuated his intrenchments on the Maryland shore and re- 
treated into Virginia. 

The glorious sun-burst of this victory at Antietam lighted 
up the whole North. For the moment partisan spite and pas- 
sion themselves were dumb, and the gratitude of a nation re- 
warded the galhnt soldiers to whom under Providence it owed 
its escape from a great peril and shame. 

It is painful to know that this feeling of gratitude was by 
no means shared by the government at Washington. 

On the 20th of September General McClellan was obliged, 
in reply to several captious telegrams from General Halleck, 
complaining that the administration was " left entirely in the 
dark as to the movements of the enemy," to say, — 

" I regret that you find it necessary to couch every despatch 
I have the honor to receive from you, in a spirit of fault-find- 
ing, and that you have not yet found leisure to say one word 
in commendation of the recent achievements of this army, or 
even to allude to them." 

This contemptuous indifierence to the feelings which make up 
and maintain the military spirit and the morale of an army 
was not now for the first time exhibited by the authorities at 
Washington. 

One of the greatest of military writers has said, " it is the 
duty of a prince to reward his men for a fine retreat as highly 
as for the most brijhant victory ; for firmness under reverses 
is more honorable than enthusiasm under success, since it re- 
quires courage only to carry a position, while it demands true 
heroism to make a difficult retreat in the face of a victorious 
and enterprising enemy without being disconcerted, and stead- 
ily meeting him with a front of iron." 

Yet to the following telegram, which General McClellan sent 
to General Halleck just before his return for the Peninsula, no 
reply was ever made, nor was any notice ever taken of its 
suggestions : 



294 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

Headquaktebs Army of the Potomac. 
August 18, 1863—11 P. M. 
Please say a kind word to my army, that I can repeat to 
them in general orders, in regard to their conduct at York- 
town, "William sbm'gh, West Point, Hanover Court-House, and 
on the Chickahominy, as well as in regard to the (7) seven 
days, and the recent retreat. 

No one has ever said anything to cheer them but myself. 
Say nothing about me, merely give my men and officers credit 
for what they have done. It will do you much good, and will 
strengthen you much with them if you issue a handsome order 
to them in regard to what they have accomplished. They de- 
serve it. 

G. B. McClellan, 

Major-General. 
Maj.-Gen. Halleck, 

Comd'g U. S. Army, Washington, D. C. 



CHAPTER XII. 

AFTER ANTIETAM. GENERAL McCLELLAN CROSSES THE POTOMAC. 
THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION ISSUED BY THE PRESIDENT. 
GENERAL McCLELLAN RELIEYED FROM THE COMMAND OF THE 
ARMY. 

Something of course must be pardoned to men who, being 
no more than mortal, found themselves in the humiliating posi- 
tion into which the official superiors of General McClellan had 
now, by their real inferiority to that officer, been brought. 
The campaigns of Pope in Virginia, and McClellan in Mary- 
land, had demonstrated this inferiority, not merely to all other 
competent observers, but to these official superiors themselves* 
The President and General Halleck knew that but for General 
McClellan and the army which he alone had been able to hold 
together, the beginning of September would have seen them 
fugitives from Washington or prisoners in Richmond : and it 
would be asking too much, perhaps, of human frailty to find 
fault with them for a certain degree of restlessness and dis- 
comfort in his presence. 

But that they should have set themselves at work as soon 
as the safety of the North was assured, to find or make an oc- 
casion for depriving its saviour of his command was a crime 
against the State, the magnitude of which is only to be 
measured by all that the nation has since been thereby called 
to bear of loss, of suffering, and of shame. 

Yet the events which now took place are difficult of expla- 
nation upon any other theory than this. 

Five days after the battle of Antietam the President issued 



296 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

his proclamation of emancipation, declaring a general war 
against the social system of the seceded States, to begin on 
the 1st of January, 1863. 

This proclamation of course was utterly inconsistent with 
all those principles in obedience to which alone General Mc- 
Clellan, in his letter from Harrison's Landing, had expressed his 
belief that the war could be honorably and successfully con- 
ducted. And as it is now known* that the publication of this 
proclamation had been delayed, by the advice of Mr. Secretary 
Seward, until a glow of triumph should have dawned upon the 
Union arms, it is a new and curious illustration of the Presi- 
dent's notions of " confidence" and " cordial support" that he 
should have availed himself of General McClellan's victory of 
Antietam to fulminate a *' bull" on the politics of the war, dia- 
metrically hostile to all that officer's often and earnestly ex- 
pressed convictions in respect to our military policy. 

General McClellan, however deej^ly he may have felt the in- 
opportuueness of this proclamation, dealt with it in the spirit 
of a soldier and a citizen, who recognized the just limits of 
civil and of military authority, respectively. 

" The principles upon which, and the object for which, ar- 
mies shall be employed in suppressing rebellion," he said, in a 
General Order to his troops, October 7th, 1862, "must be de- 
termined and declared by the civil authorities ; and the chief 
executive, who is charged with the administration of the na- 
tional affairs, is the proper and only source through which the 
needs and orders of the Government can be made known to 
the armies of the nation. Discussions by officers and soldiers 
concerning public measures determined upon and declared by 
the Government, when once carried beyond temperate and re- 
spectful expressions of opinion, tend greatly to impair and 
destroy the discipline and efficiency of troops, by substituting 

* See the facts in this case stated in the explanatory prospects of 
Mr. Carpenter's picture of the President and his Cabinet preparing 
this proclamation. 



^ LIFE OF GEN. GE6EGE B. McCLELLAN. 297 

the spirit of political faction for that firm, steady and earnest 
support of the authority of the Government, which is the high- 
est duty of the American soldier. The remedy for political 
errors, if any are committed, is to be found only in the action 
of the people at the polls. 

" In carrying out all measures of public policy," added 
the general, in conclusion, "this army will, of course, be 
guided by the same rules of mercy and Christianity that have 
ever controlled their conduct towards the defenceless." 

General McClellan's abstinence from interference in the civil 
policy of the administration was not reciprocated by a similar 
abstinence on the part of the administration from interference 
in his own military plans. 

His efibrts to strengthen his army for ofiensive operations 
were constantly thwarted. Troops promised to him to-day, 
were suddenly diverted to-morrow to distant and independent 
commands.* The transportation of necessary supplies and 
material to his army was impeded by carelessness, or worse 
than carelessness, in the bureaux of the war department, and 
the office of the general-in-chief at "Washington. The ancient 
spectre of an invasion by the way of Manassas rose again to 
trouble the rest of the President and his councillors. 

On the 1st of October the President visited General Mc- 
Clellan at his headquarters, went through the camps, and went 
over the battle-fields of South Mountain and Antietam.f 

The condition of the army was fully explained to the Presi- 
dent, who recognized, or seemed to recognize, the absolute 
impossibility of moving immediately upon a new campaign of 
invasion in the face of an organized and powerful enemy, and 



* For example, Sigel's troops were first put at his disposal, and then 
without his knowledge senfc into West Virginia. 

f It was upon this occasion that the President shocked the army and 
the nation by calling upon one of his suite to entertain him with certain 
comic songs while riding among the fresh graves of the soldiers who 
had fallen in the terrible battles of September. 

13* 



298 LIFE OF GEiq". GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

who expressed his renewed and grateful confidence in its com- 
mander. 

The army under General McClellan was indeed utterly worn 
down by the efforts which it had made. The main body was 
composed of the troops which General Pope had exhausted in 
his fatal campaign at the end of August. Hastily reorganized 
by General McClellan in the first week in September, the army 
had been marched through the mountains of Maryland to fight 
the fierce battles of South Mountain and Antietam. It needed 
everything that an army can need, horses for the cavalry, shoes 
and equipments for the men,* supplies, in short, of all kinds, 
without which it would have been sheer madness to move into 
an enemy's country at the approach of winter. 

The President, however, on the 6th of October, directly 
after his return to Washington, caused his general-in-chief to 
issue an order commanding General McClellan to " cross the 
Potomac, and give battle to the enemy or drive him south." 

The President, the secretary of war, and General Halleck 
must have known, when this order was issued, that it would 
not be obeyed, for they knew that it could not be obeyed.—^ 
Whether they expected, by issuing it, to drive General Mc- 
Clellan into a resignation, or were merely preparing a " record " 
to which they might afterwards appeal in proof of his " tardi- 
ness" and their own " energy" is, perhaps, a question. There 
can be no question, however, that the order itself was an out- 
rage alike upon common sense and all military propriety. It 

* Corps commanders upon receiving notice from the quartermasters 
til at they might expect to receive their supplies at certain dates, sent 
their trains for them, which, after waiting, were compelled to return 
empty. Several instances occurred where these trains went back and 
forth from the camp to the depots as often as four or five different times 
without receiving their supplies ; and I was informed by one corps com- 
mander, that his wagon train had travelled over one hundred and fifty 
miles to and from the depots, before he succeeded in obtaining his 
clothing. 

The corps of General Franklin did not get its clothing until after it 
had crossed the Potomac, and was moving into Virginia. — Report, p. 411. 



LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 299 

was followed up, a week later, by another of those astonishing 
military letters of advice and instruction which President Lin- 
coln seems never to have ceased writing until the success of 
General Grant in taking Yicksburg, a year afterwards, on a 
plan which his excellency had not suggested, induced him to 
admit that a general in the field might sometimes understand 
what he was doing better than a politician in the White 
House. 

Some of the propositions of this letter, dated October 13th, 
deserve immortality. 

*' As we must beat him somewhere or fail finally," said his 
excellency, speaking of General Lee, " we can do it, if at all, 
easier near to us than far away." The results of General 
Pope's experience at " beating the enemy near to" Washing- 
ton, recent as they were, would seem to have quite passed 
away from the presidential memory when this brilliant maxim 
was evolved from the depths of the presidential mind ! 

Again said the presidential commander-in-chief, " if we can- 
not beat the enemy where he now is we never can." This 
dogma was the more discouraging that neither the President 
nor General McClellan himself exactly knew where the enemy 
at this moment was. 

Fortunately, however, for the country, after expatiating in 
a highly wonderful manner over the map, and displaying an 
amazing facility at making geometrical war, the President 
wound up with the saving clause, " this letter is in no sense 
an order." 

A weary interchange of telegrams now went on between 
the headquarters of General McClellan and the Aulio council 
at Washington, the latter urging an immediate movement, the 
former insisting, as it was his duty to insist, that the army 
should not be hurried into the field unprepared for the serious 
work before it. 

The merits of this tedious controversy are well summed up 
in the following passage from General McClellan's report : 



300 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

Washington, Oct. 21, 1862—3 p. m. 
Your telegram of 12 m. has been submitted to the President. 
He directs me to say, that he has no change to make in his 
order of the 6th inst. If you have not been, and are not now 
in condition to obey it, you will be able to show such want of 
ability. The President does not expect impossibilities; but 
he is very anxious that all this good weather should not be 
wasted in inactivity. 

Telegraph when you will move, and on what lines you pro- 
pose to march. 

H. W. Halleck, 

General-in-Chief. 
Maj.-Gen. G. B. McClellan. 

" From the tenor of this dispatch I conceived that it was left 
for my judgment to decide whether or not it was possible to 
move with safety to the army at that time, and this responsi- 
bihty I exercised with the more confidence, in view of the 
strong assurance of his trust in me as commander of that army, 
with which the President had seen fit to honor me during his 
last visit. 

" The cavalry requirements, without which an advance would 
have been in the highest degree injudicious and unsafe, were 
still wanting. The country before us was an enemy's country, 
where the inhabitants furnished to the enemy every possible 
assistance, providing food for men and forage for animals, giv- 
ing all information concerning our movements, and rendering 
every aid in their power to the enemy's cause. It was mani- 
fest that we should find it, as we subsequently did, a hostile 
district, where we could derive no aid from the inhabitants, 
that would justify dispensing vt^ith the active co-operation of an 
efficient cavalry force. Accordingly, I fixed upon the 1st of 
November as the earliest date at which the forward movement 
could well be commenced. 



XIPE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN". 301 

" The general-in-chief, in a letter to the secretary of war on 
the 28th of October, says : 'In my opinion there has been no 
such want of supplies in the array under General McClellan as 
to prevent his compliance with the orders to advance against 
the enemy.* 

" Notwithstanding this opinion expressed by such high au- 
thority, I am compelled to say again that the delay in the 
reception of necessary supplies up to that date, had left the 
army in a condition totally unfit to advance against the enemy ; 
that an advance under the existing circumstances would, in 
my judgment, have been attended with the highest degree of 
peril, with great suffering and sickness among the men, and 
with imminent danger of being cut off from our supplies by 
the superior cavalry force of the enemy, and with no reasona- 
ble prospect of gaining any advantage over him. 

" I dismiss this subject with the remark, that I have found it 
impossible to resist the force of my own convictions, that the 
commander of an army who, from the time of its organization, 
has, for eighteen months, been in constant communication with 
its officers and men, the greater part of the time engaged in 
active service in the field, and who has exercised this command 
in many battles, must certainly be considered competent to 
determine whether his army is in proper condition to advance 
on the enemy or not ; and he must necessarily possess greater 
facilities for forming a correct judgment in regard to the wants 
of his men, and the condition of his supplies, than the general- 
in-chief in his ofl3.ce at Washington city." 

Before moving upon the enemy. General McClellan was ex- 
tremely anxious so to guard the line of the Potomac as to put a 
stop to the possibility of those raids by the Shenandoah, which 
have since inflicted, through three consecutive years, so much 
shame upon our army, and so much loss upon the people of 
the Pennsylvania and Maryland border. The importance of 
taking these precautions was increased in the mind of General 



302 LIFE OP GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

McClellan by the fact that Bragg's rebel army was then at 
liberty to reinforce Lee, and so to enable him to do precisely 
what he has since done, not once nor twice, but regularly with 
the recurrence of the harvest season of the Shenandoah. 

General McClellan urged this matter upon General Halleck 
at Washington. The only reply which the general-in-chief 
vouchsafed was the information that " no appropriation existed 
for permanent intrenchments,".and a silly sneer to the effect 
that Bragg was four hundred miles away while Lee was but 
twenty. 

On the 26th of October the army finally began to cross the 
Potomac, and marching on a line east of the Blue Ridge, by 
the Vth of November its several corps were massed at and 
near Warrenton. " The army," says General McClellan, " was 
ia admirable condition and spirits. I doubt whether during 
the whole period that I had the honor to command the Army 
of the Potomac it was ever in such excellent condition to fight 
a great battle." The Confederates, under Longstreet, were 
directly in front at Culpepper, and the rest of Lee's army lay 
west of the Blue Ridge. The army and its general alike ex- 
pected, with confidence and hope, the issue of a new and near 
impending passage-of-arms with their antagonists. 

In this expectation the army and its general alike were 
destined to be disappointed. 

Delivered from the terror of Lee's presence in the IN'orth ; 
reassured for the safety of Washington by the position of the 
army, and persuaded that victory must crown its next efforts, 
the administration seem to have judged the moment come for 
striking down the general whom they hated, as men hate those 
whom they have injured. 

Late on the night of November Tth, 1862, in a storm of 
wind and rain. General Buckingham, arriving post haste from 
Washington, reached the tent of General McClellan at Rector- 
town. He found the commander surrounded by his staff and 



LIFE OP GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 803 

by some of the generals of the army, and handed him a des- 
patch of which he was the bearer. 

Opening the despatch and readmg it without a change of 
countenance or of voice, General McClellan passed over to 
General Burnside a paper which it contained, saying, as he did 
so, " Well, Burnside, you are to command the army." 



CHAPTER XIII. 

NOMINATIOIf OF GElirERAIi MCCLELLAN TO THE PRESIDENCY. THE CON- 
DUCT OF THE WAR. MR. LINCOLN AND HIS AULIC COUNCIL. GENERAL 
MCCLELLAN'S policy of THE "WAR. HIS TRUE RECORD AS A COM- 
MANDER. 

On the 28th of August, 1864, two years after his final re- 
moval from the command of the Army of the Potomac, Gen- 
eral McClellan received at Chicago a unanimous nomination 
from one of the largest political conventions ever assembled 
in America, as the candidate of the Democratic party for the 
Presidency of the United States. 

During those years the conduct of the war for the Union 
had been surrendered up entirely into the control of those 
Aulic councillors of President Lincoln whose efforts to under- 
mine the military and the political influence of General Mc- 
Clellan at Washington we have seen beginning almost at the 
moment of his nomination to the command-in-chief of the na- 
tional armies in November, 1861, remorselessly prosecuted 
during the whole campaign of the Peninsula, and finally tri- 
umphant after the campaign of Maryland in November, 1862. 

Under the control of these councillors the Republic had 
gradually become one vast camp. Armies such as the civilized 
world had never seen arrayed for battle since the downfall of 
the first Napoleon, had been summoned into the field. The 
debt of the nation and of the States had been swelled to pro- 
portions rivalling the burdens imposed by the ambition and the 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 305 

folly of many successive generations upon the most cruelly 
misgoverned empires of the Old World. Restrictions foreign 
to the habits of the people and to the spirit of the Constitu- 
tion had been imposed upon liberty of speech and of the press. 
In many sections of the country, quite beyond the sphere of 
hostilities, life had been made almost intolerable, not only to 
those who differed from the dominant party in respect to the 
wisdom of its war policy, but to those also who impugned its 
capacity for administering that policy. It had been openly 
proclaimed by those who had a right to be heard as speaking 
for the administration, that rebels had no rights which loyal 
men were bound to respect ; that the war begun for the en- 
forcement of their constitutional obligations upon the seceded 
States ought to be waged in contempt of the constitutional 
rights of those States ; that the rebellion of the South justified 
and demanded a revolution by the North. 

In the course of these two years of Aulic power men had 
gradually come to see that, in the language of Mr. Lincoln 
himself, " the civil war had radically changed the occupations 
and habits of the American people ;" but it was by no means 
so clear that, in the language of Mr. Lincoln, this change was 
effecting " for the moment" only. The war had been so ill- 
managed, in a military sense, by the presidential commander- 
in-chief and his councillors, that notwithstanding repeated vic- 
tories of the national armies in the stricken field, no substan- 
tial progress appeared to be making towards the dispersion of 
the great Confederate armies and the pacification of the Con- 
federate populations. Richmond, after defying repeated at- 
tempts at its reduction according to the plan of campaign 
which the Aulic council at Washington and the President had 
vainly endeavored to coerce General McClellan into adopting, 
still held out against the concentrated force of the national 
armies moving at last as that commander had two years before 
urged that they should move. Yast regions of territory west 
and eastof the Mississippi, which had once been occupied by the 



303 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

troops of the Union, had been abandoned again to the Confede- 
rate arms. The solemn petitions put up to the Divine Majesty 
in executive proclamations that He would " subdue the anger 
which had produced and so long sustained a needless and cruel 
rebellion, and change the hearts of the insurgents,"* had been 
turned almost into a mockery by measures directly calculated 
to inflame the anger of the populations in rebellion and to 
harden the hearts of the insurgents against the government 
and the people of the Union. 

In contemplating this condition of affairs men who, as Mr. 
Jefferson said of himself in the dark hours of the alien and 
sedition laws, " retained unadulterated the principles of 1775," 
had begun seriously to tremble for the future of the Republic. 
Of the war so conducted, in such a spirit and for such objects, 
they saw but two possible issues : the subjugation of the South 
and the degradation of its States to the condition of conquered 
provinces ; or the collapse of the national resources and the 
consequent recognition of the Confederate States as a rival 
and victorious power. 

Both of these issues were abhorrent to the minds of such 
men. 

To the former issue no specious representations of the moral 
glory and the national health to be acquired by the abolition 
of the institution of slavery could reconcile even those among 
them who held slavery in the deepest detestation. They saw 
that a sincere hatred of slavery could no more excuse a social 
war in its name upon communities originally independent thaa, 
a sincere hatred of heresy could justify the enforcement of the 
Catholic religion by the sword upon such communities. Nor 
could they look forward to the prolonged struggle which such 
a war would necessitate, without the gravest concern as to the 
effects of such a struggle upon the character of the American 
people and upon their political institutions. Mr. Lincoln had 
already announced that " the dogmas of the quiet past were 

* Proclamation of a Day of National Thanksgiving, 15th July, 1863. 



LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 307 

inadequate to the stormy present." If the storm was to be 
protracted indefinitely, not the dogmas only, but the whole so- 
cial order also of the quiet past must vanish before its vio- 
lence. Mr. Lincoln, it is true, had also announced that he was 
not " able to appreciate the danger that the American people" 
might come, by familiarity with military rule, " to lose the 
right of public discussion, the liberty of speech and the press, 
the law of evidence, trial by jury, and the habeas corpus.^'* 
But those who remembered that Mr. Lincoln and his Aulic 
councillors had been conspicuous for years among those who 
could not *' appreciate the danger" that sectional controversy, 
conducted in a temper of unfraternal passion, might lead to 
civil war, were more likely to take warning from the dismal 
experience than to find comfort in the cheerful confidence of 
the President. Mr. Lincoln's easy faith that *' our strife per- 
tains to ourselves, to the passing generations of men, and can, 
without convulsion, be hushed forever with the passing of one 
generation,"* seemed to such men somewhat at variance with 
the facts of history and the characteristics of mankind. It 
has been well said by one who had himself passed through the 
fiery furnace of civil war : " The most frightful feature of a civil 
war is not the blood which flows on every side, nor the dead 
who strew the streets and roads, nor the shattered walls of 
once happy homes ; it is the passions which ferment in men's 
souls. * * * The sombre legend which begins the story of 
the world, the legend of Cain and Abel, seems to hover over 
these fratricidal conflicts, and to stamp them with a seal of 
infernal rage." To transmit these fermenting passions through 
indefinite years to come, is a crime against the human race 
which has an associated and progressive destiny. For men 
are not isolated to the point they occupy in space or time. 
"They hold on one to the other ; they act one on the other by 
ties and means which do not require their personal presence 
and which survive them, so that successive generations of men 
* Message of President Lincoln, December, 1863. 



308 LIFE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

are inter-connected with each other and linked together by the 
act of succession." 

Mr. Lincoln's quaint notion of a geographical nationality, his 
dogma that the " land we inhabit would ere long force re-union, 
however much of blood and treasure the separation might hav3 
cost," may perhaps be a formidable indictment of himself and 
his administration for spending blood and treasure to do the 
work of the equator and the poles; but it could hardly be ex- 
pected to reconcile those who believe a nation to consist of men 
and not of acres, to seeing the life of a generation given up to 
a war of moral or material domination. 

To the issue of the recognition of the Confederate States, 
those who shuddered at the idea of a prolonged social war 
against the South, were equally averse. They looked upon 
such a recognition as a calamity both to the North and to the 
South. They saw in it the copious seed of future strife, as 
well as a present source of national humiliation. They believed 
that it could be avoided by a prosecution of the war at once 
soldierlike and statesmanlike, by the prostration of the military 
strength of the seceded States, and by the protection of their 
political rights. 

In argument with those who thus believed and felt, the 
Aulic council was powerless. The force of its appeals to the 
vehemence of the Southern resistance, and to the reiterated 
demands of the South for absolute independence, was broken 
by the simple fact that throughout nearly the whole of its 
course the war had not been fought for the Union, nor under 
the control of men who held the maintenance of the Union 
paramount to all other considerations. It was idle to say what 
the South would or would not do in a contingency which had 
never been presented to the South, the contingency of a com- 
plete overthrow of the military power of the South accompa- 
nied by a strictly constitutional assertion of the authority of 
the Union. 

To raise to power a Federal administration capable of pre- 



LIFE OF GEN". GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 809 

senting this contingency to the South became the great ani- 
mating purpose, not of the Democratic party alone, but of 
thousands upon thousands of conservative citizens of all parties, 
as the time drew near in the summer of the present year, for 
the nomination of a presidential candidate in opposition to Mr. 
Lincoln. 

In obedience to this purpose it is that Major-General Mc- 
Clellan has been summoned from his enforced retirement into 
the foreground of the political field. 

The record of General McCIellan's connexion with the con- 
duct of the war most assuredly justifies the confidence thus re- 
posed in him. 

"We have seen that at the outset of his career as a Federal 
commander in Western Virginia, he clearly set before himself, 
his soldiers and the people of Virginia, the specific objects of 
the war, and the limitations imposed by those objects upon 
the duty of the government in arms. 

We have seen that in his counsels addressed to the Presi- 
dent, at the request of that functionary, in his general orders 
to his troops, in his instructions to the generals acting under 
him, he steadily and consistently adhered to those objects and 
reasserted these limitations. 

Since his removal from duty with the army, he has again 
and again taken various suitable occasions to reiterate his con- 
viction that " while the war is fighting, all citizens should see 
that the war is prosecuted for the preservation of the Union 
and the Constitution, for their nationality and their rights as 
citizens."* 

Holding these convictions as to the politics of the war, 
General McClellan, as we have seen, was actively engaged in 
the military conduct of the war from the summer of 1861 to 
the fall of 1862. During that time he conducted only two cam- 
paigns in a comparative freedom from the practical interference 
of the administration with his plans. 

* Speech at Trenton, N. J., Nov. 13, 1863. 



810 LIFE OF GEN. GEOEGE B. McCLELLAN. 

The first of these was the campaign of "Western Virginia. 
In this campaign, of two months' duration, he invaded with 
raw troops a mountainous and difficult country ; outmanoeuvred, 
met and routed two armies, taking from them five guns, 
twelve colors, fifteen hundred stand of arms, and a thousand 
prisoners, and restored the whole region of "West Virginia per- 
manently to its allegiance. The second of these campaigns 
was the campaign of Maryland. The administration, paralyzed 
for the moment by fear, abandoned this campaign to him. In 
seventeen days he re-organized a broken army, marched it in 
pursuit of the victorious invader, before whom it had given 
way but a few days previously to his assumption of the com- 
mand, manoeuvred it successfully through a mountainous and 
difficult country, brought the foe to battle, and in two fierce 
and sanguinary actions, one of which, for the numbers engaged 
and the price paid for victory, must always rank with the 
great historic battles of the world, utterly broke his power and 
drove him beyond the Potomac. 

"We have here then in the story of less than three months, 
the whole of General McClellan's record as an independent 
and untrammelled commander in the field ; a record which 
begins with Rich Mountain to end with Antietam. 

For three months more — the months of August, September 
and October, 1861 — General McClellan filled the post of com- 
mander of the division of the Potomac. In that time he reor- 
ganized the army of General McDowell, which had been routed 
at Bull Run, surrounded the city of Washington, which had 
been for days at the mercy of General Beauregard, with de- 
fences strong enough to defy an army of thrice the strength 
of that which triumphed at Manassas, and created the whole 
framework of a national army of half a million of men. 

For two months — the months of November and December, 
1861 — General McClellan was the commander-in-chief of the 
armies of the Union. In that time he drew up a grand gene- 
ral plan of operations for the re-establishment of the Federal 



LITE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 311 

authority, of which it is no more than justice to say, that while 
our most lamentable subsequent reverses are directly traceable 
to the departures of the government from its scope and tenor, 
our greatest military successes have been won by acting in 
harmony with them. 

For six months — from January to July, 1862 — General Mc- 
Clellan was the acting-commander of the Peninsula campaign 
against Richmond ; his plans, his force, his very manoeuvres 
being continually supervised and interfered with by a President 
profoundly ignorant of war, and an Aulic council, careful only 
of partisan and political interests. Yet in those six months, 
disappointed, deceived, thwarted at every step, he compelled 
the concentration of the enemy's forces upon Virginia, besieged 
and captured a city fortified with lines admitted to be among 
the strongest and most extensive in the world ; invested the 
Confederate capital more closely than has ever since been possi- 
ble to a Federal army ; fought and won two ofiensive battles, 
the second of which, but for the reckless incapacity of the 
President and his advisers, would have given him possession 
of Richmond ; successfully resisted the onslaught of Johnston, 
in June, at Fair Oaks ; and finally saved his army from the 
overwhelming attack of the combined Confederate forces of 
Lee and Jackson by one of the boldest and most skilM retreats 
in history'; delivering battle daily through a week of victory ; 
more than balancing the single defeat of Gaines' Mills with 
the magnificent triumph of Malvern Hill, and winning posses- 
sion, as the prize of the valor of his men and of his own skill 
and firmness, of the finest base which has ever been occupied 
by a Federal expedition against Richmond. 

For two months more — the months of July and August — 
General McClellan commanded, at Harrison's Bar, a great 
army, secretly doomed to destruction as an organization, while 
his destined successor. General Pope, was making ready, in 
the north, to eclipse him utterly by the splendor of a whirl- 
wind march upon Richmond. Deceived at first, and then dis- 



312 LEPE OF GEN. GEORGE B. McCLELLAN. 

regarded, he quietly devoted himself to re-establishing the 
strength of his army. Recalled, at last, by a sudden and 
almost insulting telegram, he moved his troops rapidly to the 
Rappahannock, and appeared in person at Alexandria, to find 
that his army was taken from him. Ere a week of this in- 
tended disgrace, however, had passed by, the government 
which had planned it had cast itself once more upon him for 
light and for deliverance, appealed to him for aid, and aban- 
doned the cause of the nation to his charge. For three weeks, 
as we have seen, he now dealt with the enemy according to 
his own judgment. Antietam relieved the terrors of Wash- 
ington. Again the commander-in-chief who "could order 
what he pleased" ^appeared upon the scene, and the military 
career of General McClellan under the administration of Abra- 
ham Lincoln, came to an end on the Yth of November, 1862, 
eleven days after he had began to move upon the enemy at 
the head of the army which he had redeemed from ruin, and 
re-organized into power. 

Setting over aojainst this record of the brief connexion of Gen. 
McClellan with the conduct of the war, the record of the long 
years during which the conduct of the war has been controlled 
by Mr. Abraham Lincoln and his Aulic councillors, no man, 
it would seem, who holds the cause of the Union sacred and 
full of hope, can well fail to see that its issues, whether of 
battle or of policy, may still be safe in the hands of the former, 
but must already be surrendered as lost in the hands of the 
latter. 

THE END. 



3ij.77"2 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing Agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: 

OCT 1997 
BARKEEPER 

PRESERVATION TECHNOLOGIES. INC. 
1 1 1 Thomson Parte Drive 
CranberryTwp., PA 16066 
(412)779-2111 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




011 021 712 2 









'.•'•i...fj;.-i 




